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A string is defined as a contiguous sequence of code units terminated by the first zero code unit (often called the NUL code unit). [1] This means a string cannot contain the zero code unit, as the first one seen marks the end of the string. The length of a string is the number of code units before the zero code unit. [1]
Both character termination and length codes limit strings: For example, C character arrays that contain null (NUL) characters cannot be handled directly by C string library functions: Strings using a length code are limited to the maximum value of the length code. Both of these limitations can be overcome by clever programming.
To eliminate this problem, a common implementation is for the macro to use table lookup. For example, the standard library provides an array of 256 integers – one for each character value – that each contain a bit-field for each supported classification. A macro references an integer by character value index and accesses the associated bit ...
This allows the string to contain NUL and made finding the length need only one memory access (O(1) (constant) time), but limited string length to 255 characters. C designer Dennis Ritchie chose to follow the convention of null-termination to avoid the limitation on the length of a string and because maintaining the count seemed, in his ...
char * pc [10]; // array of 10 elements of 'pointer to char' char (* pa)[10]; // pointer to a 10-element array of char The element pc requires ten blocks of memory of the size of pointer to char (usually 40 or 80 bytes on common platforms), but element pa is only one pointer (size 4 or 8 bytes), and the data it refers to is an array of ten ...
Some languages have character types that are too small to represent all Unicode characters. These are more properly categorized as integer types that have been given a misleading name. For example C includes a char type, but it is defined to be the smallest addressable unit of memory, which several standards (such as POSIX) require to be 8 bits.
The difference is that "A" represents a null-terminated array of two characters, 'A' and '\0', whereas 'A' directly represents the character value (65 if ASCII is used). The same backslash-escapes are supported as for strings, except that (of course) " can validly be used as a character without being escaped, whereas ' must now be escaped.
Thus, an array of numbers with 5 rows and 4 columns, hence 20 elements, is said to have dimension 2 in computing contexts, but represents a matrix that is said to be 4×5-dimensional. Also, the computer science meaning of "rank" conflicts with the notion of tensor rank , which is a generalization of the linear algebra concept of rank of a matrix .)