The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake.

The article addresses the question of what ought to count as the most expensive mistake in the history of information technology and computer science. An argument is presented that it should be the use of NUL-terminated text strings in the C program language, Unix operating system and Posix software...

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Publicado en:Communications of the ACM Vol. 54; no. 9; pp. 42 - 45
Autor principal: KAMP, POUL-HENNING
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Association for Computing Machinery Sep2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        Scientific errors
        Cost accounting
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        Computer science
        Information technology
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          Scientific errors
          Cost accounting
          Computer programming
          History of science
          Computer science
          Information technology
      ab: The article addresses the question of what ought to count as the most expensive mistake in the history of information technology and computer science. An argument is presented that it should be the use of NUL-terminated text strings in the C program language, Unix operating system and Posix software standard. The decision to use NUL-terminated strings, rather than representing strings as an address plus length tuple, was made by computer scientists Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan in the early 1970s. The article notes that this was not considered to be a mistake for at least 15 years afterward.
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