Comment by Someone
1 day ago
> I've always wondered at the motivatons of the various string routines in C
This idiom:
char hostname[20];
...
strncpy( hostname, input, 20 );
hostname[19]=0;
exists because strncpy was invented for copying file names that got stored in 14-byte arrays, zero terminated only if space permitted (https://stackoverflow.com/a/1454071)
Technically strncpy was invented to interact with null-padded fixed-size strings in general. We’ve mostly (though not entirely) moved away from them but fixed-size strings used to be very common. You can see them all over old file formats still.
It’s also horrible because each project ends up reinventing their own abstractions or solutions for dealing with common things.
Destroys a lot of opportunity for code reuse / integration. Especially within a company.
Alternatively their code base remains a steaming pile of crap riddled with vulnerabilities.
That's how everything works. You start off with some atomics and build up from there. Things that people like get standardized, And before you know what's going on it's called stdlib.
It took a decade between Stroustrup's 1985 book "The C++ Programming Language" and the STL proposed and accepted by the ANSI/ISO committee in 1994.
I've always assumed that the n in strncpy was meant to signify a max length N. Now I'm wondering if it might have stood for NUL padding.