That's C, though. You're writing C. DMR gave you that, in 1972. (Actually not, because you had to wait for structs, but you know what I mean). But what you

That's C, though. You're writing C. DMR gave you that, in 1972. (Actually not, because you had to wait for structs, but you know what I mean). But what you seem to be asking for is support in the language for strings that work like this. And that causes problems because of that special handle you've invented. Now strings aren't arrays anymore, they can't have pointers taken to them, they can't have substrings in a natural way, they can't live in ordinary POD memory as a unified thing. All of which is totally solvable in the runtime of a language written in 2003 or whenenver. But not on a PDP-11.