just looked at the A5 wdlman.pdf and empty strings were instaciated with
string name = "#10000";
or just string name = " "; (disclaimer: length of space not in scale)

So i would say that STRING *name[10000]; would be equivalent. I always though that string arrays were not possible with A5, maybe an update added that. But keep in mind that this way no memory would be allocated for those strings afaik. So you would have to call str_create for all 10.000 STRING-pointer.