So I teach coding to idiots. Confusing or poorly defined abstractions in pseudocode are bad. If you want people to infer useful information from pseudocode, and learn good practices from it, you need to treat it as if there a real underlying class structure written with good practices, or even better, make it comply to some actual language which does that. If you want to imply that this is a member of string, something like string.len_chars is way better imo because it captures the idea of a string being an array. Then the next question can be about string.len_bytes (watch the wheels turn!). That naturally transitions nicely into object oriented paradigms of object containers/storage being at once a templated abstraction with a stride and depth, and also a physical thing in memory.