In the case of C, it's a design decision Denis Ritchie made that came down to the particular instruction set of PDP-11, that could efficiently process zero term

In the case of C, it's a design decision Denis Ritchie made that came down to the particular instruction set of PDP-11, that could efficiently process zero terminated strings. So a severely memory limited architecture of the 70s led to blending of data with control - which is never a safe idea, see naked SQL. We now perpetuate this madness of nul-terminated strings on architectures that have 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more memory than the original PDP-11. It's also highly inefficient, because a the length of string is a fundamental property that must me recomputed frequently if not cached. Bottom line, unless you work on non-security sensitive embedded systems like microwave ovens or mice, there is absolutely no place for nul-terminated strings in today's computing.