> but `std::span` should have been there decades ago

Absolutely! I now use it consistently in all new projects where I can afford to mandate C++20. I guess nobody bothered to make a proposal before...

They did in C, from one of the language authors even, and it was not accepted.

By the way, both Extended Pascal, Mesa/Cedar and Modula-2 have them, under the name of open arrays.

Basically it took Go, C# and others for C++ to finally get its span.

C probably never will.

	▲	spacechild1 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Everybody knows that C++ did not invent the concept of spans and that it was late to the party. It doesn’t change the fact that (presumably) nobody made a proposal to the C++ standard.