[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Bob Eager]

On Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:07:02 -0500, Bob Koehler wrote:

> In article <7ij0ueF30a3ujU4 at mid.individual.net>, Bob Eager
> <rde42 at spamcop.net> writes:
>> 
>> I think that's inevitable when the major language in use is C. That's a
>> design issue; I was thinking more of how well the code was (not)
>> written.
> 
>    Which makes you wonder why the inventors of C settled on such a
>    design in a day when CPUs were so much slower.  If I had a system
>    slower than a PDP-11/70, I'd have wanted it to spend it's time doing
>    better things.

I never saw that that, in particular, caused any kind of performance 
problem. The libraries that used it were few - it's not often that you 
need to know the length of a string; more often you need to know when 
you've reached the end, and that is equally well served by a count or a 
terminator.

However, they didn't want a real limit on the lengths of strings. If 
they'd used a length prefix (as the predecessor to C did) they'd have had 
to make it two bytes, minimum. That would have used an extra byte per 
string, a waste of an even more valuable resource.

CPU time is 'extensible'; you can wait a little longer. Memory is not; 
lack of it is a showstopper (overlays aside).



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