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September 13, 1988

Clement Victor Clarke

C.C.S.‑Jol Pty. Ltd.

31 Queen Street

Melbourne 3000

Victoria Australia

Dear Mr. Clarke,

Your letter of August 2nd to Bill Gates has been forwarded to me for a response.

Thank you for your suggestions on how to improve string handling in C. Have you had a chance to examine the latest version of our C compiler? While we have not implemented a new string type as such, we have been able to take advantage of the fact that ANSI now defines the run time library as standard. This gives the compiler writer the option of generating code inline for a function. Starting with version 5.0, Microsoft C will optionally generate in‑line code for selected string functions, including strcmp. As well as eliminating the function call overhead, those cases where the length of one of the operands can be deduced at compile time which results in better performance, since it is not then necessary to determine the number of characters to compare, a time consuming process with null‑delimited strings such as those in C. We feel that while this does not eliminate the admittedly cumbersome source code required to use the functional notation, it does provide much of the performance improvements of an explicit string type.

Again, thank you for taking the time to write and express your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Dr. David T. Jones

Group Development Manager

Systems Languages

DTJ:dw

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