String and char type
--------------------

char = 1..255
       i.e. with space for none (=0) in an optional type
       This is not necessarilly a whole character. The "real"
       characater type is uint32.


string = char#[nullterm]



This also makes it possible to compare strings with character literals safely:

    s#[0] == "a"       // ok because both are arrays of the same size
    s#[0..+1] == "å"   // ok because both are arrays of the same size
    
    t = "A"
    t#[0..+2]          // what should this do? fill with zeros?


Empty string
------------
Some compilers (e.g. FreePascal) implement empty strings as null pointers.
This is probably a quite good optimization, since empty strings are common,
and are also often compared with other strings. But it requires that the
string type is a pointer and is not compatible with C.

A compromise could be to have two string types, one "C-style" null terminated
array (which you usually pass by reference), and one "FreePascal-style"
pointer.

Strings in FreePascal use reference counting, which helps reducing copying and
keeps memory usage down, but could cause problems with multi-threaded code
which would not be expected by the programmer since the sharing happens behind
the scene. AFAIK a String type looks like this:

 Index   Data
 -----   ----
  -8     Reference count
  -4     Length
   0...  String data