If I recall correctly a pascal string has the length before the string. Ie to get the length you dereference the pointer and look backwards N bytes to get the length. A pascal string is still a single pointer.

You cannot cheaply take an arbitrary view of the interior string - you can only truncate cheaply (and oob checks are easier to automate). That’s why pointer + length is important because it’s a generic view. For arrays it’s more complicated because you can have a stride which is important for multidimensional arrays.