尽管我很喜欢C和c++，但我还是忍不住对空结尾字符串的选择抓耳挠脑:

Length prefixed (i.e. Pascal) strings existed before C Length prefixed strings make several algorithms faster by allowing constant time length lookup. Length prefixed strings make it more difficult to cause buffer overrun errors. Even on a 32 bit machine, if you allow the string to be the size of available memory, a length prefixed string is only three bytes wider than a null terminated string. On 16 bit machines this is a single byte. On 64 bit machines, 4GB is a reasonable string length limit, but even if you want to expand it to the size of the machine word, 64 bit machines usually have ample memory making the extra seven bytes sort of a null argument. I know the original C standard was written for insanely poor machines (in terms of memory), but the efficiency argument doesn't sell me here. Pretty much every other language (i.e. Perl, Pascal, Python, Java, C#, etc) use length prefixed strings. These languages usually beat C in string manipulation benchmarks because they are more efficient with strings. C++ rectified this a bit with the std::basic_string template, but plain character arrays expecting null terminated strings are still pervasive. This is also imperfect because it requires heap allocation. Null terminated strings have to reserve a character (namely, null), which cannot exist in the string, while length prefixed strings can contain embedded nulls.

其中一些东西比C语言出现得更晚，所以C语言不知道它们是有道理的。然而，在C语言出现之前，有些语言就已经很简单了。为什么会选择空终止字符串，而不是明显更好的长度前缀?

编辑:因为有些人问了关于我上面提到的效率点的事实(他们不喜欢我已经提供的事实)，他们源于以下几点:

使用空结尾字符串的Concat需要O(n + m)时间复杂度。长度前缀通常只需要O(m)。 使用空结尾字符串的长度需要O(n)时间复杂度。长度前缀为O(1)。 Length和concat是迄今为止最常见的字符串操作。在一些情况下，以空结尾的字符串可能更有效，但这种情况发生的频率要低得多。

从下面的答案，这些是一些情况下，空终止字符串更有效:

When you need to cut off the start of a string and need to pass it to some method. You can't really do this in constant time with length prefixing even if you are allowed to destroy the original string, because the length prefix probably needs to follow alignment rules. In some cases where you're just looping through the string character by character you might be able to save a CPU register. Note that this works only in the case that you haven't dynamically allocated the string (Because then you'd have to free it, necessitating using that CPU register you saved to hold the pointer you originally got from malloc and friends).

上面这些词都没有length和concat常见。

下面的答案中还有一个断言:

你需要把绳子的一端剪掉

但这个是不正确的——对于以null结尾的字符串和有长度前缀的字符串，它的时间是相同的。(以Null结尾的字符串只是在你想要的新结尾的地方插入一个Null，长度前缀只是从前缀中减去。)