Thought on an ANSI lint

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1057 at vsi.COM> friedl at vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:
-     I am postulating that it would be helpful to have a lint
-option that make string literals "array of const char" rather
-than "array of char" and do type checking on that basis.

This is basically a good idea, since attempts to modify string
literals are non-portable.

-The Committee apparently considered this for the language itself
-but eventually rejected it (maybe some ANSI-kind-of-people could
-comment on this).  Perhaps they rejected it because it would have
-required that old code be retrofitted with /const/ everywhere,
-and they felt this was too high a burden to place on those using
-a new compiler.

No, the main counterargument was that there is a lot of existing
code that depends on the ability to modify string literals (e.g.
mktemp() on UNIX), so compilers for those clientele would best
preserve that property.