Obtaining an address given a (run time) variable name

[evilrat]

On Tuesday, 21 January 2025 at 09:34:29 UTC, DLearner wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 January 2025 at 05:54:48 UTC, evilrat wrote:
>> On Monday, 20 January 2025 at 22:32:02 UTC, DLearner wrote:
>>> It was because my understanding was that in certain 
>>> situations the string construct did not just produce a 
>>> character array - it also produced the (to me horrible) 
>>> concept of adding a x'00' immediately after the last 
>>> character of the array.
>>
>> This is only for compile-time known strings (aka literals) for 
>> easy C interop, if you make strings at runtime they won't have 
>> null terminator as a granted.
>
> Suppose we have:
> ```
> string str1 = "A" ~ "B";
> ```
>
> Does that produce:
>    str1 == x'41' x'42' x'00' or
>         == x'41' x'00' x'42' x'00' or
>         == x'41' x'00' x'42' x'00' x'00'?
>
> And is str1.length == 2 or
>                    == 3 or
>                    == 4?

In this example it definitely should be length == 2, if it is not 
then it is a bug.

It should only add null terminator AFTER the end of complete 
string, but it is technically not a part of that string.
You know, accessing slice memory beyond its length is unsafe, you 
should really never do this unless you are 100% know what exactly 
are you doing.

Look, here is why it does that - in C it is basically a 
convention that all strings is null terminated because this is 
how standard library works and so everyone else has to follow.
D gives you a favor by doing this automatically without the need 
of putting `string greeting = "hello\0"` or `"hello " ~ "world" ~ 
'\0'` everywhere in your code.

I hope this is now simple enough to understand.