f python?

[Rainer Weikusat]

Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap at library.lspace.org.invalid> writes:

[...]

>>For one thing, if s is a non-empty null terminated string then,
>>cdr(s) is also a string representing the rest of that string 
>>without the first character,
>
> Are you really too clueless to differentiate between C and LISP?

In LISP, a list is a set of conses (pairs) whose car (first element of
the pair) contains a value and whose cdr (second element of the pair)
links to the next cons that's part of the list. The end of a list is
marked by a cdr whose value is nil. A so-called 'C string' is a
sequentially allocated sequence of memory locations which contain the
characters making up the string and the end of it is marked by a
memory location holding the value 0. This is logically very similar
to the LISP list and it shouldn't be to difficult to understand that
'cdr(s) is also a string representing the rest of the string' means
'given that s points to a non-empty C string, s + 1 points to a
possibly empty C string which is identical with s with the first
character removed'. 

>>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.

This is, I think, a case where the opinions of people who have used C
strings and the opinions of people who haven't differ greatly. A nice
German proverb applicable to situations like that would be 'Was der
Bauer nicht kennt das frisst er nicht' ...