They didn't like to pass around the dimension of the array with the argument value. That got them a few bytes at the cost of a billion dollars. That's the same

They didn't like to pass around the dimension of the array with the argument value. That got them a few bytes at the cost of a billion dollars. That's the same kind of trade off as with zero as end of string marker. On the other side: the platform might not have received any following without saving a few bytes here and there, computer memory was a scarce resource at the time.