Why null-terminated strings? Or: null-terminated vs. characters + length storage

Question

I\'m writing a language interpreter in C, and my string type contains a length attribute, like so:

struct String
{
    char* charac         


        

Answer 1

One benefit is that with null-termination any tail of a null-terminated string is also a null-terminated string. If you need to pass a substring starting with Nth character (provided there's no buffer overrun) into some string-handling function - no problem, just pass the offseeted address there. When storing size in some other way you would need to construct a new string.