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In case anyone doesn't know, this is actually what Pascal and other "Wirth languages" do. The underlying representation of a string in memory has the length stored before the string data.

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And Delphi also adds the terminating null, so interacting with C-style APIs is quick, as there's no explicit conversion needing to happen before passing it as a "C string".

I remember vaguely that AmigaOS kept some remnants of this convention. Not from Pascal but from sth called B/CPL. A few (small majority) of system functions took arguments in this peculiar [<len><string>] format.

Afaik AmigaOS itself was based on some earlier OS written in B or BCPL language.

PS: Here's some story behind this http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/BCPL

And pointers were stored/passed by dividing them with 4. Certainly a bit annoying and I really never understood why.

Maybe to get 256kB address space with 16bit pointers ? Edit: 4 times error

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