Ancient C string conventions

[Paul Rubin]

Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp at snipabacken.se> writes:
> It's somewhat believable. If I handled thousands of student names in a
> big C array char[30][], I would resent the fact that 1/30 of the
> memory was wasted on NUL bytes. 

But you'd be wasting even more of the memory on bytes left unused when
the student's name is less than 30 chars.  If memory is that scarce you
need a different representation.