Why do strings in C need to be null terminated?

Question

Just wondering why this is the case. I\'m eager to know more about low level languages, and I\'m only into the basics of C and this is already confusing me.

Do langu

Answer 1

Because in C strings are just a sequence of characters accessed viua a pointer to the first character.

There is no space in a pointer to store the length so you need some indication of where the end of the string is.

In C it was decided that this would be indicated by a null character.

In pascal, for example, the length of a string is recorded in the byte immediately preceding the pointer, hence why pascal strings have a maximum length of 255 characters.