🚀 go-pugleaf

>If the C convention for strings had been length oriented, I suspect that
>Dhrystone would come out with a better approximation of reality.  This
>would be due to the heavier usage of mem*-like routines for moving and
>comparing the strings.

Why would people use mem*-like routines for manipulating counted
strings, but not use str*-like routines for manipulating
null-terminated ones?  The only reason I can think of is that since
finding the length/end of a string is a constant-time operation with
counted strings, but is linear in the length of the string with
null-terminated strings, people would be less tempted to write their
own string manipulation code that found the end of a string as a side
effect of the processing.  Is this what you had in mind?

I'd be interested to know how much string processing is, in fact,
done by *ad hoc* code because it didn't quite match the string
routines available on the system?  "strtok" and company weren't in
V7, so people would usually have done their own string-chopping.