[xnorswap]

That's not what it's doing though.

Pascal strings are: { length, pointer }

In these strings:

For short strings it's storing:

  { length, string value}

for longer strings, it's storing

  {length, prefix, class, pointer }

[masklinn]

> Pascal strings are: { length, pointer }

The historical P-strings are just a pointer, with the length at the head of the buffer. Hence length-prefixed strings, and their limitation to 255 bytes (only one byte was reserved for the length, you can still see this in the most base string of freepascal: https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu9.html).

    {length, pointer}

or

    {length, capacity, pointer}

is struct / record strings, and what pretty much every modern language does (possibly with optimisations e.g. SSO23 is basically a p-string when inline, but can move out of line into a full record string).