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I am working through C++ program design by Cohoon and Davidson. This is what it says about string class attributes (3rd Edition, Page 123):
My question is: If we know the characters in the string, does not it implies we already know about number of characters in the string? What is the need to explicitly specify the second attribute?
Well in C we know the number of elements because we can count up to the NULL terminal. But think how expensive it is to get the length of a string? It takes walking the entire string. For such a common operation, why wouldn’t we want this to be a constant-time operation?