> Look at Rust's &str for the state of the art. Other choices are less important, but having string references be fat pointers is a huge boon. It would probably

> Look at Rust's &str for the state of the art. Other choices are less important, but having string references be fat pointers is a huge boon. It would probably have seemed profligate in the 1980s, but it was the right choice. ANS Forth[1], released 1994, used (addr, len) pairs throughout, eliminating most uses of “counted” (Pascal) strings in Forth-83 and earlier. [1] https://forth.sourceforge.net/std/dpans/ https://forth.sourceforge.net/std/dpans/