Expressing strings as null terminated or in a data structure that includes the size and data has no relationship to it being a higher or lower level language. T

Expressing strings as null terminated or in a data structure that includes the size and data has no relationship to it being a higher or lower level language. They still need to determine where a string starts and ends in memory. The means of doing so is different, the assembly language representation will be slightly different, but the language isn't hiding anything behind an abstraction. Contrast that to, say, Pascal where the length of the string is hidden from the developer and can only be accessed through function calls. (It probably should be, but that is beside the point.)