[asveikau]

> A PString is the address of a character buffer like C, but the length of the string is stored at a negative offset. I may be remembering wrong but I think there was an older C++ STL that also used negative offsets.

In the Microsoft world, BSTR from COM/OLE does this. Though I think the length prefix is 4 bytes, and the payload is 16 bit wchars.

[cpeterso]

An interesting difference between BSTR and Pascal strings is that BSTR strings, in addition to the length prefix, are NUL terminated (for compatibility with C string APIs). And since Pascal strings track their length in the prefix, they can support strings with embedded NUL bytes.