[Info-vax] Calling standards, was: Re: Byte range locking - was Re: Oracle on VMS

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-11-25 13:38, VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> In article <o175ok$2f0$1 at Iltempo.Update.UU.SE>, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
>> On 2016-11-23 18:09, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> True.  I just looked in my RSTS manual and the RSX executive doesn't
>>> have .ANYTHING directives at all.  Now I have to go look at some of
>>> my other manuals and see just who else used null terminated strings.
>>> UNIVAC-1100 did not.  It, too, had descriptors.  I have a number of
>>> other assembler manuals be interesting to know just how many used
>>> null termination as a common method.  I know it was fairly common
>>> in Z80 code i worked with even before a C compiler became common.
>>
>> In most processors, using a NUL to indicate the end of a string makes it
>> efficient to write the code. So you'll probably see it on almost any
>> architecture where people want to deal with dynamic length strings.
>>
>> The other alternative is to keep a count, but that uses more memory, and
>> in some cases adds a bit of complexity, which people often try to avoid
>> (programmers being lazy and all).
>
> Memory is cheap!  Considering other coding practices today that bloat code,
> a byte count of a string is pale by comparison.

Today that is true for most cases. Historically, not so much...

	Johnny