string is const char [] ?

[Horst von Brand]

Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br> said:
> Kamil Iskra <kamil@dwd.interkom.pl> writes:
> > On 23 Jun 1998, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> >> >   char a1[] = "test not const";

> >> This line should cause egcs to flag an error.

I think this is ridiculous. Why should it matter that the value from which
a particular variable is _initialized_ is or not a constant? With this
reasoning, we'd have:

  int i = 5;   // illegal?!
  int j = k;   // OK, as long as k isn't 'const int'?!

> > Excuse me?! I missed the original mail, but do you really suggest that all
> > the programmers should suddenly switch to:

> > char a1[]={'t', 'e', 's', 't', ' ', 'n', 'o', 't', ' ', 'c', 'o', 'n',
> > 's', 't', '\0'};

By the above reasoning, this should be an error too.

Besides, in C doing what you state above is quite common, is compatibility
with C being thrown out the window just like that for no reason at all?

> How about:

> const char a1[] = "test not const";

That means something totally different.

Something is very broken here. Maybe my understanding of the issue ;)
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                       mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl
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