Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!rex!ukma!hsdndev!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: shared storage for string literals?
Message-ID: <16293@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 29 May 91 07:35:53 GMT
Article-I.D.: smoke.16293
References: <21996@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <21996@ogicse.ogi.edu> vegdahl@ogicse.cse.ogi.edu (Steve Vegdahl) writes:
>The ANSI standard states that two identical string literals may share storage.

Actually it says that identical string literals need not be distinct.

>Question: can non-identical substrings share storage if one is a substring
>of the other, and they share a common "tail"?

Sure.  The standard doesn't allow a strictly conforming program to modify
string literals, so this would be a safe implementation practice, and I
would be greatly surprised if no C implementation were doing this.

Surely any application that depended on nonoverlap would be depending on
something that the standard does not guarantee.