Brutkey

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

C strings are a sequence of bytes ending in a zero byte. It's awkward, cumbersome, error prone & stupid in many ways, but in the early 1970s, having strings with a length field was expensive. When your biggest computer has about 9 KiB of RAM, spending two or four bytes to express the length of a string was hideously expensive. A one byte terminator was the cheapest option in terms of memory use.

There's more resources available today, but entrenched fundamentals are quite difficult to change.