Calavera是对的，但由于人们似乎没有理解他的观点，我将提供一些代码示例。

首先，让我们考虑一下C是什么:一种简单的语言，其中所有代码都可以直接转换为机器语言。所有类型都适合寄存器和堆栈，并且它不需要一个操作系统或一个大的运行时库来运行，因为它是用来编写这些东西的(考虑到今天甚至没有一个可能的竞争对手，这个任务非常适合)。

如果C语言有一个字符串类型，比如int或char，它将是一种不适合寄存器或堆栈的类型，并且需要以任何方式处理内存分配(及其所有支持的基础设施)。所有这些都违背了C语言的基本原则。

因此，C语言中的字符串是:

char s*;

那么，我们假设这是有长度前缀的。让我们编写代码来连接两个字符串:

char* concat(char* s1, char* s2)
{
    /* What? What is the type of the length of the string? */
    int l1 = *(int*) s1;
    /* How much? How much must I skip? */
    char *s1s = s1 + sizeof(int);
    int l2 = *(int*) s2;
    char *s2s = s2 + sizeof(int);
    int l3 = l1 + l2;
    char *s3 = (char*) malloc(l3 + sizeof(int));
    char *s3s = s3 + sizeof(int);
    memcpy(s3s, s1s, l1);
    memcpy(s3s + l1, s2s, l2);
    *(int*) s3 = l3;
    return s3;
}

另一种方法是使用struct来定义字符串:

struct {
  int len; /* cannot be left implementation-defined */
  char* buf;
}

此时，所有的字符串操作都需要进行两次分配，这实际上意味着您将通过一个库来进行任何处理。

有趣的是……这样的结构体在C中确实存在!它们只是不用于日常显示消息给用户处理。

所以，这就是Calavera的观点:在c语言中没有字符串类型，要对它做任何事情，你必须获取一个指针，并将其解码为指向两个不同类型的指针，然后字符串的大小就变得非常相关，而不能仅仅是“实现定义”。

现在，C可以以任何方式处理内存，并且库中的mem函数(甚至在<string.h>中!)提供了将内存作为一对指针和大小来处理所需的所有工具。C语言中所谓的“字符串”的创建只有一个目的:在为文本终端编写操作系统的上下文中显示消息。因此，空终止就足够了。

不一定是基本原理，而是长度编码的对应物

Certain forms of dynamic length encoding are superior to static length encoding as far as memory is concerned, it all depends on usage. Just look at UTF-8 for proof. It's essentially an extensible character array for encoding a single character. This uses a single bit for each extended byte. NUL termination uses 8 bits. Length-prefix I think can be reasonably termed infinite length as well by using 64 bits. How often you hit the case of your extra bits is the deciding factor. Only 1 extremely large string? Who cares if you're using 8 or 64 bits? Many small strings (Ie Strings of English words)? Then your prefix costs are a large percentage. Length-prefixed strings allowing time savings is not a real thing. Whether your supplied data is required to have length provided, you're counting at compile time, or you're truly being provided dynamic data that you must encode as a string. These sizes are computed at some point in the algorithm. A separate variable to store the size of a null terminated string can be provided. Which makes the comparison on time-savings moot. One just has an extra NUL at the end... but if the length encode doesn't include that NUL then there's literally no difference between the two. There's no algorithmic change required at all. Just a pre-pass you have to manually design yourself instead of having a compiler/runtime do it for you. C is mostly about doing things manually. Length-prefix being optional is a selling point. I don't always need that extra info for an algorithm so being required to do it for a every string makes my precompute+compute time never able to drop below O(n). (Ie hardware random number generator 1-128. I can pull from an "infinite string". Let's say it only generates characters so fast. So our string length changes all the time. But my usage of the data probably doesn't care how many random bytes I have. It just wants the next available unused byte as soon as it can get it after a request. I could be waiting on the device. But I could also have a buffer of characters pre-read. A length comparison is a needless waste of computation. A null check is more efficient.) Length-prefix is a good guard against buffer overflow? So is sane usage of library functions and implementation. What if I pass in malformed data? My buffer is 2 bytes long but I tell the function it's 7! Ex: If gets() was intended to be used on known data it could've had an internal buffer check that tested compiled buffers and malloc() calls and still follow spec. If it was meant to be used as a pipe for unknown STDIN to arrive at unknown buffer then clearly one can't know abut the buffer size which means a length arg is pointless, you need something else here like a canary check. For that matter, you can't length-prefix some streams and inputs, you just can't. Which means the length check has to be built into the algorithm and not a magic part of the typing system. TL;DR NUL-terminated never had to be unsafe, it just ended up that way via misuse. counter-counter point: NUL-termination is annoying on binary. You either need to do length-prefix here or transform NUL bytes in some way: escape-codes, range remapping, etc... which of course means more-memory-usage/reduced-information/more-operations-per-byte. Length-prefix mostly wins the war here. The only upside to a transform is that no additional functions have to be written to cover the length-prefix strings. Which means on your more optimized sub-O(n) routines you can have them automatically act as their O(n) equivalents without adding more code. Downside is, of course, time/memory/compression waste when used on NUL heavy strings. Depending on how much of your library you end up duplicating to operate on binary data, it may make sense to work solely with length-prefix strings. That said one could also do the same with length-prefix strings... -1 length could mean NUL-terminated and you could use NUL-terminated strings inside length-terminated. Concat: "O(n+m) vs O(m)" I'm assuming your referring to m as the total length of the string after concatenating because they both have to have that number of operations minimum (you can't just tack-on to string 1, what if you have to realloc?). And I'm assuming n is a mythical amount of operations you no longer have to do because of a pre-compute. If so, then the answer is simple: pre-compute. If you're insisting you'll always have enough memory to not need to realloc and that's the basis of the big-O notation then the answer is even more simple: do binary search on allocated memory for end of string 1, clearly there's a large swatch of infinite zeros after string 1 for us to not worry about realloc. There, easily got n to log(n) and I barely tried. Which if you recall log(n) is essentially only ever as large as 64 on a real computer, which is essentially like saying O(64+m), which is essentially O(m). (And yes that logic has been used in run-time analysis of real data structures in-use today. It's not bullshit off the top of my head.) Concat()/Len() again: Memoize results. Easy. Turns all computes into pre-computes if possible/necessary. This is an algorithmic decision. It's not an enforced constraint of the language. String suffix passing is easier/possible with NUL termination. Depending on how length-prefix is implemented it can be destructive on original string and can sometimes not even be possible. Requiring a copy and pass O(n) instead of O(1). Argument-passing/de-referencing is less for NUL-terminated versus length-prefix. Obviously because you're passing less information. If you don't need length, then this saves a lot of footprint and allows optimizations. You can cheat. It's really just a pointer. Who says you have to read it as a string? What if you want to read it as a single character or a float? What if you want to do the opposite and read a float as a string? If you're careful you can do this with NUL-termination. You can't do this with length-prefix, it's a data type distinctly different from a pointer typically. You'd most likely have to build a string byte-by-byte and get the length. Of course if you wanted something like an entire float (probably has a NUL inside it) you'd have to read byte-by-byte anyway, but the details are left to you to decide.

TL;DR您使用二进制数据吗?如果不是，那么null终止允许更多的算法自由。如果是，那么代码数量vs速度/内存/压缩是你的主要关注点。两种方法的混合或记忆可能是最好的。

GCC接受以下代码:

Char s[4] = "abcd";

如果我们把is当作字符数组，而不是字符串数组，这是可以的。也就是说，我们可以使用s[0]， s[1]， s[2]和s[3]，甚至使用memcpy(dest, s, 4)访问它。但是当我们尝试使用put (s)时，我们会得到混乱的字符，或者更糟糕的是使用strcpy(dest, s)。

不知怎的，我把这个问题理解为C中没有编译器支持以长度为前缀的字符串。下面的例子显示，至少你可以开始你自己的C字符串库，其中字符串长度在编译时计算，使用这样的构造:

#define PREFIX_STR(s) ((prefix_str_t){ sizeof(s)-1, (s) })

typedef struct { int n; char * p; } prefix_str_t;

int main() {
    prefix_str_t string1, string2;

    string1 = PREFIX_STR("Hello!");
    string2 = PREFIX_STR("Allows \0 chars (even if printf directly doesn't)");

    printf("%d %s\n", string1.n, string1.p); /* prints: "6 Hello!" */
    printf("%d %s\n", string2.n, string2.p); /* prints: "48 Allows " */

    return 0;
}

然而，这不会带来任何问题，因为你需要小心什么时候特别释放字符串指针，什么时候它是静态分配的(字面字符数组)。

编辑:作为对这个问题更直接的回答，我的观点是，这是C既可以支持可用的字符串长度(作为编译时间常数)的方式，如果你需要它，但如果你只想使用指针和零终止，仍然没有内存开销。

当然，使用以零结尾的字符串似乎是推荐的做法，因为标准库一般不接受字符串长度作为参数，而且提取长度的代码不像char * s = "abc"那样简单，正如我的示例所示。

还有一点没有提到:当C语言被设计出来的时候，有很多机器的“char”不是8位的(即使是今天的DSP平台也不是8位的)。如果一个人决定字符串是长度前缀，应该使用多少'char'的长度前缀?使用two会人为地限制具有8位字符和32位寻址空间的机器的字符串长度，而在具有16位字符和16位寻址空间的机器上浪费空间。

If one wanted to allow arbitrary-length strings to be stored efficiently, and if 'char' were always 8-bits, one could--for some expense in speed and code size--define a scheme were a string prefixed by an even number N would be N/2 bytes long, a string prefixed by an odd value N and an even value M (reading backward) could be ((N-1) + M*char_max)/2, etc. and require that any buffer which claims to offer a certain amount of space to hold a string must allow enough bytes preceding that space to handle the maximum length. The fact that 'char' isn't always 8 bits, however, would complicate such a scheme, since the number of 'char' required to hold a string's length would vary depending upon the CPU architecture.

这个问题是作为长度前缀字符串(LPS)与零终止字符串(SZ)的问题提出的，但主要暴露了长度前缀字符串的好处。这似乎有些势不可挡，但老实说，我们也应该考虑到LPS的缺点和SZ的优点。

在我看来，这个问题甚至可以被理解为一种带有偏见的提问方式:“零终止字符串的优势是什么?”

零终止字符串的优点(我看到了):

very simple, no need to introduce new concepts in language, char arrays/char pointers can do. the core language just include minimal syntaxic sugar to convert something between double quotes to a bunch of chars (really a bunch of bytes). In some cases it can be used to initialize things completely unrelated with text. For instance xpm image file format is a valid C source that contains image data encoded as a string. by the way, you can put a zero in a string literal, the compiler will just also add another one at the end of the literal: "this\0is\0valid\0C". Is it a string ? or four strings ? Or a bunch of bytes... flat implementation, no hidden indirection, no hidden integer. no hidden memory allocation involved (well, some infamous non standard functions like strdup perform allocation, but that's mostly a source of problem). no specific issue for small or large hardware (imagine the burden to manage 32 bits prefix length on 8 bits microcontrollers, or the restrictions of limiting string size to less than 256 bytes, that was a problem I actually had with Turbo Pascal eons ago). implementation of string manipulation is just a handful of very simple library function efficient for the main use of strings : constant text read sequentially from a known start (mostly messages to the user). the terminating zero is not even mandatory, all necessary tools to manipulate chars like a bunch of bytes are available. When performing array initialisation in C, you can even avoid the NUL terminator. Just set the right size. char a[3] = "foo"; is valid C (not C++) and won't put a final zero in a. coherent with the unix point of view "everything is file", including "files" that have no intrinsic length like stdin, stdout. You should remember that open read and write primitives are implemented at a very low level. They are not library calls, but system calls. And the same API is used for binary or text files. File reading primitives get a buffer address and a size and return the new size. And you can use strings as the buffer to write. Using another kind of string representation would imply you can't easily use a literal string as the buffer to output, or you would have to make it have a very strange behavior when casting it to char*. Namely not to return the address of the string, but instead to return the actual data. very easy to manipulate text data read from a file in-place, without useless copy of buffer, just insert zeroes at the right places (well, not really with modern C as double quoted strings are const char arrays nowaday usually kept in non modifiable data segment). prepending some int values of whatever size would implies alignment issues. The initial length should be aligned, but there is no reason to do that for the characters datas (and again, forcing alignment of strings would imply problems when treating them as a bunch of bytes). length is known at compile time for constant literal strings (sizeof). So why would anyone want to store it in memory prepending it to actual data ? in a way C is doing as (nearly) everyone else, strings are viewed as arrays of char. As array length is not managed by C, it is logical length is not managed either for strings. The only surprising thing is that 0 item added at the end, but that's just at core language level when typing a string between double quotes. Users can perfectly call string manipulation functions passing length, or even use plain memcopy instead. SZ are just a facility. In most other languages array length is managed, it's logical that is the same for strings. in modern times anyway 1 byte character sets are not enough and you often have to deal with encoded unicode strings where the number of characters is very different of the number of bytes. It implies that users will probably want more than "just the size", but also other informations. Keeping length give use nothing (particularly no natural place to store them) regarding these other useful pieces of information.

也就是说，在标准C字符串确实效率低下的罕见情况下，没有必要抱怨。图书馆是可用的。如果我遵循这个趋势，我应该抱怨标准C不包括任何正则表达式支持函数……但实际上每个人都知道这不是一个真正的问题，因为有库可以用于此目的。因此，当字符串操作效率是需要的，为什么不使用像bstring库?或者甚至是c++字符串?

编辑:我最近看了看D弦。有趣的是，所选择的解决方案既不是大小前缀，也不是零终止。与C语言一样，双引号括起来的字面值字符串只是不可变字符数组的简写，并且该语言也有一个字符串关键字表示(不可变字符数组)。

但是D数组比C数组丰富得多。在静态数组的情况下，长度在运行时是已知的，因此不需要存储长度。编译器在编译时拥有它。在动态数组的情况下，长度是可用的，但D文档没有说明它保存在哪里。就我们所知，编译器可以选择将它保存在某个寄存器中，或者存储在远离字符数据的某个变量中。

正常char数组或非字符串没有最终为零,因此程序员必须把它本身如果他想叫一些C函数从D .字符串字面量的具体情况,然而D编译器仍然把零在每个字符串(允许容易把C字符串容易调用C函数?),但这零不是字符串的一部分(D不计算字符串大小)。

The only thing that disappointed me somewhat is that strings are supposed to be utf-8, but length apparently still returns a number of bytes (at least it's true on my compiler gdc) even when using multi-byte chars. It is unclear to me if it's a compiler bug or by purpose. (OK, I probably have found out what happened. To say to D compiler your source use utf-8 you have to put some stupid byte order mark at beginning. I write stupid because I know of not editor doing that, especially for UTF-8 that is supposed to be ASCII compatible).