[jerf]

"But C never claimed to support all ASCII strings."

That is precisely my point... there is no well-supported solution in core C for arbitrary binary strings, despite C's extremely frequent use in domains that require them. If you insist on using stdlib strings for other kinds of strings, you do have a problem... but you also have no other choice. Which brings it back to being a language/library problem.

As I already alluded to, C itself doesn't have a problem with length-delimited strings, and there are plenty of libraries you can get for them. But the core library for C does force this problem in your face by leaving you no other choice, and it is a valid criticism of C.

(C is such a disaster that the only thing to do is to leave it behind as quickly as possible. However, if we were somehow stuck with the language itself, there's a lot of ways we could improve the libraries it comes with, as again demonstrated by the many such improved libraries you can get. However, one of the things I've learned from learning a ton of languages over the past couple of decades is that a language almost never manages to escape from its own standard library, and the few that manage it (like D) pay a stiff adoption price in the process. C's standard library has a real problem here, that has caused real bugs, and no amount of wordplay is going to fix those decades of bugs.)