🚀 go-pugleaf

Don & (bashford@toad.scripps.edu) wrote:
: According to Plauger's book on the Draft Standard C++ library,
: there is no "operator const char *" for the string class.
: This means that you cannot do things like,

:   string filename;
:   // ...
:   ofstream ofile(filename);

: Alot of my code has things like this (I have been using the
: String class of libg++) and I suspect this is rather common
: apparently we will all have to change to:

:   ofstream ofile(filename.c_str());

: which will be incompatable with any other string class that
: does not have a c_str function (String of libg++ does not).

: Is there any compelling reason for not having the conversion
: to const char* as part of the standard?

: Don Bashford
: bashford@scripps.edu

>From what I understand, the const char* conversion operator would trigger
too many implicit type conversions in certain situations, leading to many
unpleasant surprises. the c_str() member is a way to control this. (See
Plauger's recent article in the C/C++ Users Journal which discusses this.)