There's a lot of middle ground between parsing a purely structured format and UI oriented string manipulation. Most of what I have done in my life involved semi

There's a lot of middle ground between parsing a purely structured format and UI oriented string manipulation. Most of what I have done in my life involved semi-structured data with both natural language text and structured parts with fixed lengths. It's extremely inconvenient to have no string functions available when working with byte arrays. I actually like the C approach a lot in principle, because it doesn't make you choose one or the other.