Question

Compare support for strings in C/C++ with another language in hhterms of pros/cons and similarities/differences. Provide specific coding examples.

Answer 1

Answer)

A string in C/C++ and other high-level languages such as python is an array of characters. In C then end of the string is determined by a terminating null character '\0'.  

There are a number of methods available for working with strings in C/C++ are below and comparing the same method in a high-level language such as python:

1) In C we have <string.h> library predefined which provides support for String. It provides methods such as strcat() it concatenates two strings.

Example:

char str1[] = "hello", str2[] = "world";

strcat(str1,str2);

It combines str1 and str2 and the result is stored back in str1.

In python, we can just use '+' to concatenate strings.

Example: s1= "Hello" , s2="world"

s3= s1 + s2

The result is stored in s3 that is hello world. The advantage compared to c is that it does not require to import the library.

2) In C/C++ strings are mutable which means that we can change the content of the string. Whereas, In other languages such as java and python strings are immutable.

3) In C strlen() used to find the length of the string. In python len() methods return the length of the array.

Example: a="hello";

strlen(a); // gives 5 in C.

len(a); // gives 5 in python