Not to defend C strings too hard, but it does make some sort of sense, IMO. You have to manage all your buffers manually in C, whether they contain a string or not. If you store a string of length 5 in a 10-byte buffer, you still need to manage the 10-byte buffer. Raw pointers kept things very flexible and lightweight when C was created.
Nowadays, things like C++ string_view's and Rust str slices handle this for you automatically, but those came around much later and require more sophistication at compile time.
Yes, but it's not that much more sophistication, because C already supports structs. (Though I'm not sure if the first versions of C already had structs?)
Nowadays, things like C++ string_view's and Rust str slices handle this for you automatically, but those came around much later and require more sophistication at compile time.