The routines are actually written in C and it would be unreasonable and wasteful to force C programmers to build descriptors just so that they could be decoded back to the same C strings that they started off as. For this reason, every NBS routine (except a few which handle character strings) has an associated NBC routine which passes all character parameters as C zero-terminated strings, all input scalar parameters by value and all other parameters by reference. See the source of the demonstration programs described in Appendix C for examples of the use of this C-callable version.
NBS The Noticeboard System