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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Literal strings in C
Message-ID: <8163@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 18-Jun-87 12:25:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8163
Posted: Thu Jun 18 12:25:32 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Jun-87 12:25:32 EDT
References: <212@inco.UUCP>, <21065@sun.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 18
Keywords: l-valued vs r-valued

> It might be nice if C compilers were to offer an option that not only
> attempted to put string literals in a non-writable portion of the
> address space, but assigned them type "const char []", so that
> attempts to modify them will be caught at compile time...

A sensible idea at first glance, and in fact at least one earlier draft
of X3J11 tried that.  The trouble is that making this work consistently is
hard:  people routinely assign the addresses of string literals to "char *"
pointers, so complaining about unconsting (to coin a word... ugh) will
produce a zillion complaints unless one is, somehow, very selective about
it.  As I recall, the situation now is that unconsting, except by explicit
cast, is illegal, which makes it impractical to make string literals const.

Actually, I suspect that "egrep mktemp" will pick up the vast majority of
the problem cases.
-- 
"There is only one spacefaring        Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
nation on Earth today, comrade."   {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry