[ascar]

At least you don't have (obvious) performance problems with it, because you will effectively never need more than 9 (usually 2 or 3) of these bytes.

But sure on modern 64 bit systems just using a 64 bit integer makes much more sense. On a small embedded 8 bit oder 16 bit microcontroller it might make sense.

[selfhoster11]

You are correct, I was trying to show that such a scheme was practical even in the early 1980s when zero-termination was beginning to dominate. This could well be used on 64-bit systems (just with a larger word size than a byte), though the utility of such a thing is questionable.