I was thinking about how much space they saved in their C strings by having a null byte instead of the Pascal style pointer and length struct ... on their original 16 bit systems, it was one. One byte! So much pain was caused by that decision.
more than 20 years ago i did write in PL/I some bits, and i did write in Algol on a system project (embedded OS and dev tools for it). Man, it is ugly.