A good moment to appreciate the elegance of UTF-8 which allowed to encode multi-byte characters preserving the semantics of C strings.
>The quote() SQL function only shows characters up to and excluding the first NUL.
>The .dump command in the CLI omits the first NUL character and all subsequent text in the SQL output that it generates. In fact, the CLI omits everything past the first NUL character in all contexts.
That's just all kinds of "oh no", wow.
I mean, I can't come up with a better strategy, but... oof. C-style strings being a thing at all really hurts.
Well, C strings exist and are probably here to stay.
I believe Pascal strings, where the length is stored in the 0th character, were much worse (also, obligatory reference to Joel Spolsky's “Back to Basics” and “fucked strings” [1]).
Looks like we only got enough memory to spare to allow arbitrary length strings with arbitrary characters – that is, being able to use 2 or 4 bytes for the length of every string – in 1990s or so, when C++ strings and similar types became popular.
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/