That's exactly what I was thinking: a design based on a 16-bit length field would have been even more of a nightmare to migrate to 32, then 64 bits. Like what

That's exactly what I was thinking: a design based on a 16-bit length field would have been even more of a nightmare to migrate to 32, then 64 bits. Like what Churchill said about democracy: NUL-terminated is a terrible solution, but it beats whatever's in second place.