[theamk]

I don't see what's "red herring" about it - for a reasonable format, any parsing will normally be O(n) complexity, so all we can do is to decrease constant factor.

So _today_ I write parsers in a very different way as well, copying strings is very cheap (today) and not worth it extra complexity.

But remember we are talking about the past, when those conventions are being established. And back in the 90's, zero copy and zero allocations were real advantage. Not in the theoretical CS sense, but in very practical - remember there was _no_ "dynamically resizing vector" in C's (or Pascal's) stdlib, it's just raw malloc() and realloc(), and it is up to you to assemble vector from it as needed. And free()/malloc() overhead was non-trivial, you had to re-use and grow the buffer as needed. And you want to store the parsed data, storing separate length would double your index size! So a parse-in-place + null-terminated strings approach would give you both smaller code and smaller runtime, at the expense of a few sharp corners. But we were all running with scissors back then.