It's a bit more inconvenient in terms of register protection (BC
is much more generally useful than IY), but it makes tight spots
such as next and execute much faster, so I think it's worth it.
Initially, I used the same letters as those used in the z80 ref
docs, but it makes the different assemblers harder to use than they
should. Having consistent "argtype" rules across assemblers should
help.
I'm not sure why I chose null-terminated initially. Probably because
the z80asm version had null-terminated strings.
Length-prefixes strings are the traditional form of strings in Forth
and it's a bit easier to work with them with traditional forth words
when they're under this form.