Some of that is limitations in the medium, he pushed C++ pretty hard outside its comfort zone implementing the STL. Some of it is conventions of the medium, li

Some of that is limitations in the medium, he pushed C++ pretty hard outside its comfort zone implementing the STL. Some of it is conventions of the medium, like the iterators; it's just the C++ way. You copy (or move, there's a need for the distinction in C++) from ranges to iterators, it's just a more flexible perspective. C++ has a string library, you may not like it but I'm pretty sure it exists.