You're right. I was remembering something badly. I found some interesting things while looking into this, though:
C's behavior of defining literal strings as null-terminated character arrays is already described in the 1978 K&R. The word "string" is used in the text of the section, but not in its title, "character arrays". Null termination is mentioned here, as the book works through an example of successively reading lines from standard input:
`getline` puts the character \0 (the 'null character', whose value is zero)
at the end of the array it is creating, to mark the end of the string of charac-
ters. This convention is also used by the C compiler: when a string constant
like
"hello\n"
is written in a C program, the compiler creates an array of characters con-
taining the characters of the string, and terminates it with a \0 to that func-
tions such as `printf` can detect the end:
| h | e | l | l | o | \n | \0 |
the `%s` format specification in `printf` expects a string represented in this form.
There is a hint, immediately prior to this, as to why null termination might have been chosen:
The length of the array `s` is not specified in `getline` since it is determined in `main`.
(Where `getline` is a function defined in the example, and `s` is a parameter to that function.)
> In Pascal a string literal of length n is compatible with the type `packed array [1..n] of char`.
> Pascal has no support for variable-length arrays, and so any set of routines to perform string operations is dependent on a particular string size.
I suspect that I was remembering someone writing that how to represent strings was a live issue at the time of the creation of C, rather than, as I wrote above, being a live issue within C for some period after its creation.
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On an unrelated note, it's interesting to see that the web convention of fixed-width type for code literals and variable-width type for natural text was already in force in K&R 1978.
C's behavior of defining literal strings as null-terminated character arrays is already described in the 1978 K&R. The word "string" is used in the text of the section, but not in its title, "character arrays". Null termination is mentioned here, as the book works through an example of successively reading lines from standard input:
There is a hint, immediately prior to this, as to why null termination might have been chosen: (Where `getline` is a function defined in the example, and `s` is a parameter to that function.)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Pascal_and_C#Str... has an intriguing comment that seems likely to be related:
> In Pascal a string literal of length n is compatible with the type `packed array [1..n] of char`.
> Pascal has no support for variable-length arrays, and so any set of routines to perform string operations is dependent on a particular string size.
I suspect that I was remembering someone writing that how to represent strings was a live issue at the time of the creation of C, rather than, as I wrote above, being a live issue within C for some period after its creation.
----
On an unrelated note, it's interesting to see that the web convention of fixed-width type for code literals and variable-width type for natural text was already in force in K&R 1978.