[brrt]

But you're comparing apples and pears. This 'ugly hack' is - for obvious reasons - not what 90% of software on your iPhone is actually using to manipulate strings. Instead, the ugly hack known as NSString tidily wraps the char buffer, its byte-length, possibly an offset - most application developers never deal with null-terminated strings!

So in other words, I don't really understand why you are arguing for replacing a standard - one that works well for its purposes, mind you - with another when this has in fact already happened. And even less I understand why you are trying to frame a good and sound engineering decision as somehow a mistake?