> Working with strings in Pascal is relatively safe, but painfully limiting. It's a dead end. You can't build anything on top of it. Can you imagine trying to make a run-time for a high level language in Pascal? You need to be in the driver's seat regarding how strings work.

I doubt string representation is really the blocker here since C-strings are now pretty much just used by some but not all C programmers. QString and GString and C++ std::string and Rust strings and Go strings and Java strings and so on are not null terminated