[hkpack]

I am not writing in C, but always wondered, why pascal-like strings wrappers are not popular, i. e. when you have first 2 bytes represent the length of the string following by \0 terminated string for compatibility.

[sirwhinesalot]

2 bytes is not enough, usually you'll see whole "size_t" worth of bytes for the length.

But you could do something utf-8 inspired I suppose where some bit pattern in the first byte of the length tells you how many bytes are actually used for the length.

[renewedrebecca]

Pascal originally required you to specify the length of the string before you did anything with it.

This is a totally good idea, but was considered to be too much of a pain to use at the time.

[hnfong]

In C you have to do that too, like... malloc()?