尽管我很喜欢C和c++,但我还是忍不住对空结尾字符串的选择抓耳挠脑:

Length prefixed (i.e. Pascal) strings existed before C Length prefixed strings make several algorithms faster by allowing constant time length lookup. Length prefixed strings make it more difficult to cause buffer overrun errors. Even on a 32 bit machine, if you allow the string to be the size of available memory, a length prefixed string is only three bytes wider than a null terminated string. On 16 bit machines this is a single byte. On 64 bit machines, 4GB is a reasonable string length limit, but even if you want to expand it to the size of the machine word, 64 bit machines usually have ample memory making the extra seven bytes sort of a null argument. I know the original C standard was written for insanely poor machines (in terms of memory), but the efficiency argument doesn't sell me here. Pretty much every other language (i.e. Perl, Pascal, Python, Java, C#, etc) use length prefixed strings. These languages usually beat C in string manipulation benchmarks because they are more efficient with strings. C++ rectified this a bit with the std::basic_string template, but plain character arrays expecting null terminated strings are still pervasive. This is also imperfect because it requires heap allocation. Null terminated strings have to reserve a character (namely, null), which cannot exist in the string, while length prefixed strings can contain embedded nulls.

其中一些东西比C语言出现得更晚,所以C语言不知道它们是有道理的。然而,在C语言出现之前,有些语言就已经很简单了。为什么会选择空终止字符串,而不是明显更好的长度前缀?

编辑:因为有些人问了关于我上面提到的效率点的事实(他们不喜欢我已经提供的事实),他们源于以下几点:

使用空结尾字符串的Concat需要O(n + m)时间复杂度。长度前缀通常只需要O(m)。 使用空结尾字符串的长度需要O(n)时间复杂度。长度前缀为O(1)。 Length和concat是迄今为止最常见的字符串操作。在一些情况下,以空结尾的字符串可能更有效,但这种情况发生的频率要低得多。

从下面的答案,这些是一些情况下,空终止字符串更有效:

When you need to cut off the start of a string and need to pass it to some method. You can't really do this in constant time with length prefixing even if you are allowed to destroy the original string, because the length prefix probably needs to follow alignment rules. In some cases where you're just looping through the string character by character you might be able to save a CPU register. Note that this works only in the case that you haven't dynamically allocated the string (Because then you'd have to free it, necessitating using that CPU register you saved to hold the pointer you originally got from malloc and friends).

上面这些词都没有length和concat常见。

下面的答案中还有一个断言:

你需要把绳子的一端剪掉

但这个是不正确的——对于以null结尾的字符串和有长度前缀的字符串,它的时间是相同的。(以Null结尾的字符串只是在你想要的新结尾的地方插入一个Null,长度前缀只是从前缀中减去。)


当前回答

来自马的口

None of BCPL, B, or C supports character data strongly in the language; each treats strings much like vectors of integers and supplements general rules by a few conventions. In both BCPL and B a string literal denotes the address of a static area initialized with the characters of the string, packed into cells. In BCPL, the first packed byte contains the number of characters in the string; in B, there is no count and strings are terminated by a special character, which B spelled *e. This change was made partially to avoid the limitation on the length of a string caused by holding the count in an 8- or 9-bit slot, and partly because maintaining the count seemed, in our experience, less convenient than using a terminator.

Dennis M Ritchie, C语言的开发

其他回答

空终止允许基于快速指针的操作。

来自马的口

None of BCPL, B, or C supports character data strongly in the language; each treats strings much like vectors of integers and supplements general rules by a few conventions. In both BCPL and B a string literal denotes the address of a static area initialized with the characters of the string, packed into cells. In BCPL, the first packed byte contains the number of characters in the string; in B, there is no count and strings are terminated by a special character, which B spelled *e. This change was made partially to avoid the limitation on the length of a string caused by holding the count in an 8- or 9-bit slot, and partly because maintaining the count seemed, in our experience, less convenient than using a terminator.

Dennis M Ritchie, C语言的开发

Obviously for performance and safety, you'll want to keep the length of a string while you're working with it rather than repeatedly performing strlen or the equivalent on it. However, storing the length in a fixed location just before the string contents is an incredibly bad design. As Jörgen pointed out in the comments on Sanjit's answer, it precludes treating the tail of a string as a string, which for example makes a lot of common operations like path_to_filename or filename_to_extension impossible without allocating new memory (and incurring the possibility of failure and error handling). And then of course there's the issue that nobody can agree how many bytes the string length field should occupy (plenty of bad "Pascal string" languages used 16-bit fields or even 24-bit fields which preclude processing of long strings).

C语言让程序员选择是否/在哪里/如何存储长度的设计更加灵活和强大。当然,程序员必须聪明。C语言惩罚愚蠢的程序崩溃,慢慢停止,或者让你的敌人扎根。

我认为,这是有历史原因的,我在维基百科上找到了这个:

At the time C (and the languages that it was derived from) were developed, memory was extremely limited, so using only one byte of overhead to store the length of a string was attractive. The only popular alternative at that time, usually called a "Pascal string" (though also used by early versions of BASIC), used a leading byte to store the length of the string. This allows the string to contain NUL and made finding the length need only one memory access (O(1) (constant) time). But one byte limits the length to 255. This length limitation was far more restrictive than the problems with the C string, so the C string in general won out.

不知怎的,我把这个问题理解为C中没有编译器支持以长度为前缀的字符串。下面的例子显示,至少你可以开始你自己的C字符串库,其中字符串长度在编译时计算,使用这样的构造:

#define PREFIX_STR(s) ((prefix_str_t){ sizeof(s)-1, (s) })

typedef struct { int n; char * p; } prefix_str_t;

int main() {
    prefix_str_t string1, string2;

    string1 = PREFIX_STR("Hello!");
    string2 = PREFIX_STR("Allows \0 chars (even if printf directly doesn't)");

    printf("%d %s\n", string1.n, string1.p); /* prints: "6 Hello!" */
    printf("%d %s\n", string2.n, string2.p); /* prints: "48 Allows " */

    return 0;
}

然而,这不会带来任何问题,因为你需要小心什么时候特别释放字符串指针,什么时候它是静态分配的(字面字符数组)。

编辑:作为对这个问题更直接的回答,我的观点是,这是C既可以支持可用的字符串长度(作为编译时间常数)的方式,如果你需要它,但如果你只想使用指针和零终止,仍然没有内存开销。

当然,使用以零结尾的字符串似乎是推荐的做法,因为标准库一般不接受字符串长度作为参数,而且提取长度的代码不像char * s = "abc"那样简单,正如我的示例所示。