A better way to combine efficient string length encoding and zero-termination
C. Bron, E. J. Dijkstra · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1989
In this note we describe conventions for string handling, and in particular for efficient string length encoding. These conventions are based on the (C-language) zero--terminator convention, and assume that the size of the area containing the string is known. They do not require any special provisions on the part of the language implementation. The mechanism to be described caters smoothly for strings of arbitrary length. The notes are based on several years of experience within the framework of Modular Pascal.