Comment by tdeck
4 years ago
I think your parent was referring to the cost of storing a 2-byte string length instead of a 1-byte terminator. In the 1970s and 1980s, 2 bytes would likely be the minimum storage needed for the length of a general purpose string implementation. Although there were some language environments (e.g. Pascal) that had counted strings with a max length of 255.
Fair enough; but actually it can be more memory efficient as well because of the better reusability of substrings (in case of null-terminated ones only the end can be reused)