That's incorrect. If I write this in my .c file: char *s = "Hi"; The compiler will not treat that as a simple mere pointer to char when allocating space

That's incorrect. If I write this in my .c file: char *s = "Hi"; The compiler will not treat that as a simple mere pointer to char when allocating space for it in the binary. It will see that the rhs is surrounded by double quote characters, and allocate 3 bytes for it, instead of 2, and put a NUL byte after the bytes for 'H' and 'i'. Nul-tetminated strings are absolutely a part of the language. Certainly you can make and store strings in a different way if you'd like, but the language itself defines what a string and string literal is.