Zero-termination is not lower level than having a separate size, or an end pointer. What is low level is deciding on an memory representation and working with

Zero-termination is not lower level than having a separate size, or an end pointer. What is low level is deciding on an memory representation and working with it directly. A high level language will just have a "string" object, its internal representation is hidden to the programmer and could potentially be changed between versions. In C, "string" has a precise meaning, it is a pointer to a statically allocated array of bytes with the characters 's', 't', 'r', 'i', 'n', 'g' followed by a zero. That is the low level part, C programmers manipulate the memory directly and need such guarantees. Had it been defined as the number of characters in 4 bytes followed by each character of 2 bytes each in native endian would be just as low level. Defining it as "it is a character string, use the standard library and don't look too closely", as it is the case in Java is high level. The "feature" is that the memory representation of strings is well defined. The choice of zero-termination has some pros and cons. Note that in many cases, you can use size+data instead, using mem* functions instead of the str* ones. And though it is not ideal, you can also use "%.*s" in printf(). Not ideal, but workable.