[samatman]

We would all be better off if this were actually true.

Tragically, in C, a string is just barely a data structure, because it must have \0 at the end.

If it were the complete absence of a data structure, we would need some way to get at the length of it, and could treat a slice of it as the same sort of thing as the thing itself.

[jameshart]

C doesn’t really have strings at all. It has char pointers, and some standard functions that take a char pointer and act on all the chars starting from that pointer up to the first \0.

When you’re handling any kind of C pointer you need to know how big the buffer is around that pointer where pointer-arithmetic accesses make sense - but for a string, you also want to know ‘how much of the buffer is full of meaningful character data?’ - or else you’re stuck with fixed width text fields like some kind of a COBOL caveman.

But because C was designed by clever people for clever people they figured the standard string functions can just be handed a char pointer without any buffer bounds info because you can be trusted to always make sure that the pointer you give them is below a \0 within a single contiguous char buffer.

And that worked out great.

[account42]

You can work with pointer+length or begin+end pairs in C just fine - it's just annoying. But you can always upgrade to C++ and use std::string_view to abstract that for you if you want.