This reminded me on Joel's leaky abstractions. And you could hardly find more leaky than strings. Amusingly, the history of the evolution of C++ over time can

This reminded me on Joel's leaky abstractions. And you could hardly find more leaky than strings. Amusingly, the history of the evolution of C++ over time can be described as a history of trying to plug the leaks in the string abstraction. Why they couldn't just add a native string class to the language itself eludes me at the moment.