For what it's worth, while what @Camillo says is both true and important, people usually do not mention the trade offs involved or why that decision was attract

For what it's worth, while what @Camillo says is both true and important, people usually do not mention the trade offs involved or why that decision was attractive at the time. These days (ptr,size) is probably 16 bytes -- longer than almost all words in the English language (the scrabble SOWPODS maxes out at 15). A pointer alone is 8B. Back at the dawn of C in 1970, memory was 7..8 orders of magnitude more expensive than today..(about 1 cent per bit in 1970 USD). (Today, cache memory can be almost as precious, but I agree that the benefits of bounded buffers probably outweigh their costs.) 8B pointers today are considered memory-costly enough "in the large" that even with dozens of GiB machines common, Intel introduced an x32 mode to go back to 32-bit addressing aka 4B pointers. [1] There are obviously more pointers than just char* in most programs, but even so. Anyway, trade offs are just something people should bear in mind when opining on the "how it should be"s and "What kind of wacky drugs were the designers of language XYZ on?!!?". [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9233306/32-bit-pointers-with-the-x86-64-isa-why-not https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9233306/32-bit-pointers-...