Why null-terminated strings? Or: null-terminated vs. characters + length storage

Question

I\'m writing a language interpreter in C, and my string type contains a length attribute, like so:

struct String
{
    char* charac         


        

Answer 1

Just throwing out some hypotheticals:

• there's no way to get a "wrong" implementation of null terminated strings. A standardized struct however could have vendor-specific implementations.
• no structs are required. Null terminated strings are "built-in" so to speak, by virtue of being a special case of a char*.