I know, I can write my own string write/read functions.
And I know that 2 bytes isn't the end of the world.
But why didn't anyone deciding the format of a string stored in this way (as opposed to null-terminated) do it with a byte for the number of bytes for the length? In 90% of cases it would save 2 bytes per string. It's not much, but it's still a fairly obvious way to do it, and if it saves space, why not?
And I know that 2 bytes isn't the end of the world.
But why didn't anyone deciding the format of a string stored in this way (as opposed to null-terminated) do it with a byte for the number of bytes for the length? In 90% of cases it would save 2 bytes per string. It's not much, but it's still a fairly obvious way to do it, and if it saves space, why not?