From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-04-22T13:58:59+09:00
Subject: Re: String sentinels

Hi,

In message "String sentinels"
    on 02/04/21, Bob Hutchison <hutch@recursive.ca> writes:

|I was looking through the source for String and noticed that there is a
|sentinel (0x00) maintained at the end of each string. I'm wondering if
|anything in Ruby depends on this, or if it depends on the maintained length
|('len') field?

All string operations are depend on len field.  But in some cases, ptr
value is passed directly to the C functions (and system calls) which
may expect NUL termintated string pointer, for example to fopen(3).

							matz.