Re: string is const char [] ?

[Oleg Zabluda <zabluda at math dot psu dot edu>]

: On 23 Jun 1998, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
: > >> >   char a1[] = "test not const";
: >
: > >> This line should cause egcs to flag an error.

: Kamil Iskra <kamil@dwd.interkom.pl> writes:
: > > Excuse me?! I missed the original mail, but do you really suggest that al
: > > the programmers should suddenly switch to:
: >
: > > char a1[]={'t', 'e', 's', 't', ' ', 'n', 'o', 't', ' ', 'c', 'o', 'n',
: > > 's', 't', '\0'};

: Alexandre Oliva writes:
: > How about:
: > const char a1[] = "test not const";

: Kamil is trying to initialize a char[], so your suggestion is irrelevant.
: Programmers must sometimes initialize a writable string, and the standard
: way to do this in C is exactly the way you claim is forbidden.  This would
: need to be documented as a language incompatibility.

: I don't believe that you are correct, Alexandre.  I think you are
: confusing assignment (where there is a conversion) with initialization.
: If the standard is unclear, this is a case where the committee should be
: asked to produce a clarification.

I think this is the rare case when Alexandre is confusing issues,
and the standard is very clear (8.5.2)

char a1[] = "test not const"; is definitely legal. What
is also legal, but deprecated is

char *a1 = "test not const";

This generates a warning when compiled with -Wwrite-strings.

Here is a real bug in egcs:

void f(      char *) {}
voif f(const char *) {}

f("test not const"); // error in egcs. f(const char *) must be called,
                     // because the type of string literals now is
                     // array of n const char. However egcs calls
                     // f(char*). -Wwrite-strings has no effect.
                     // And even warning is surpressed.

Oleg.
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