Yes it's a thing - a worse than useless thing. A wafer thin wrapper around an array of bytes using null termination - a model of "strings" which is effectively

Yes it's a thing - a worse than useless thing. A wafer thin wrapper around an array of bytes using null termination - a model of "strings" which is effectively a computer technology fossil - nearly 60 years old at this stage.[1] It contains no specified or implied encoding - so there is way to actually interpret the data as characters which I guess wasn't a problem in the age before computer networking - your machine has an encoding built in and that was how you interpreted bytes as characters. A representation that, to save a byte or two at the header, means that determining the length of the string is an O(n) operation. It's an abstraction so leaky, it's hard to see the advantage over const char* and the leaks can never be plugged given it's part of the spec that c_str() must run in constant time. It's basically a dangling pointer generator with no unicode or any sort of internationalization support. But why provide a usable string class (never mind any sort of usable date/timestampe representations) when the language designers can spend years to add a whole new layer of absolutely useless complexity to the language - like concepts, for example. Nah - life is too short. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)