Zero Termination

You could. But note that terminating this way is just an "agreement" which all functions in C that handle strings adhere to (such as printf, strlen, etc.), to solve the problem that you can't find out the size of an array once it's been passed to a function.

For strings, this is a reasonable way of handling them since the null character is not a valid printable character anyway. But if you want to play the same trick with arrays of other types, you will have to make sure that "zero" is not an otherwise valid entry in your array.

 

0 is a mighty common value, so eliminating it as a possible value may not work out for too long for you. INT_MAX or INT_MIN are less likely to crop up in "real" input than 0, so one of these might be better. You're still reducing the valid numbers, but you're plucking one off the end rather than the dead middle . Ultimately since there's no "standard" way to do this you might be better served sticking with lugging around a length. That's just how we do things, and we like it, dagnabbit!

-Lee