karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) (06/30/88)
In article <568@tuck.nott-cs.UUCP> anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker) writes: >In article <2029@pt.cs.cmu.edu> jgk@speech2.cs.cmu.edu (Joe Keane) writes: >>To be useful, strcpy and strcat should return the end of the new string. > >If it has to be one or t'other, don't forget that the way C works it is >easier to find the end of a string given its beginning than to find its >beginning given its end. If strcpy() and strcat() return the beginning of the string, the cost of finding the end is O(N): you make another pass through the string. If they return the end of the string, the cost of finding the beginning is O(1): you already had the value, since you passed it as the first argument. At worst, you have to declare a temporary variable to hold it. Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint Followups to comp.lang.c.