Comment by ventana

> C-style strings being a thing at all really hurts.

Well, C strings exist and are probably here to stay.

I believe Pascal strings, where the length is stored in the 0th character, were much worse (also, obligatory reference to Joel Spolsky's “Back to Basics” and “fucked strings” [1]).

Looks like we only got enough memory to spare to allow arbitrary length strings with arbitrary characters – that is, being able to use 2 or 4 bytes for the length of every string – in 1990s or so, when C++ strings and similar types became popular.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/