Hi Darin! :-)

 DM> Given that they're in loops, they're the same.
You had already managed to convince me that the pointer variant is better
for string traversal. :)

[...]
 DM> for (my_ptr = my_string; *my_ptr != '\0'; ++my_ptr)
 DM> {
 DM>   /* use *my_ptr here */
 DM> }
Better in the general case, I agree. I like the explicit check for the null
character.

[...]
 DM> Yes - if you modify target.  The theory would be that finding where 
 DM> you used "target" wrong in this loop is easier than in a loop with 
 DM> indexes.  ANYWHERE you use "target" in this loop is
incorrect, while 
 DM> you need to examine the index-based equivalent very, very closely to 
 DM> figure out which use is wrong.
Ah yes.

 PS>> Yeah, that looks bad.
 DM> Especially when the message editor wordwraps it.  :-)
The formatting looked okay on my end. ;)

 PS>> What I meant was that all the string traversal "by
hand" I needed so
 PS>> far was done via strchr(3) and strrchr(3).
 DM> Hmmm - fair enough.  You've never needed to do encoding/decoding, 
 DM> obviously ;-)
Nope, I'd use library functions for that when available. All the heavier
string processing in C I've done so far was parsing, and even that mostly
via lex and yacc.

The one thing I don't like about C is its string handling. It fits with the
rest of the language, though, which uses rather shallow abstractions
throughout.

Ciao
Pascal

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