Why null-terminated strings? Or: null-terminated vs. characters + length storage

Question

I\'m writing a language interpreter in C, and my string type contains a length attribute, like so:

struct String
{
    char* charac         


        

Answer 1

From Joel's Back to Basics:

Why do C strings work this way? It's because the PDP-7 microprocessor, on which UNIX and the C programming language were invented, had an ASCIZ string type. ASCIZ meant "ASCII with a Z (zero) at the end."

Is this the only way to store strings? No, in fact, it's one of the worst ways to store strings. For non-trivial programs, APIs, operating systems, class libraries, you should avoid ASCIZ strings like the plague.