f python?

[Kaz Kylheku]

On 2012-04-09, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> In article <4f82d3e2$1$fuzhry+tra$mr2ice at news.patriot.net>,
>  Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap at library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:
>
>> >Null terminated strings have simplified all kids of text
>> >manipulation, lexical scanning, and data storage/communication 
>> >code resulting in immeasurable savings over the years.
>> 
>> Yeah, especially code that needs to deal with lengths and nulls. It's
>> great for buffer overruns too.
>
> I once worked on a C++ project that used a string class which kept a 
> length count, but also allocated one extra byte and stuck a null at the 
> end of every string.

Me too! I worked on numerous C++ projects with such a string template
class.

It was usually called 

  std::basic_string

and came from this header called:

  #include <string>

which also instantiated it into two flavors under two nicknames:
std::basic_string<char> being introduced as std::string, and
std::basic_string<wchar_t> as std::wstring.

This class had a c_str() function which retrieved a null-terminated
string and so most implementations just stored the data that way, but
some of the versions of that class cached the length of the string
to avoid doing a strlen or wcslen operation on the data.