George White wrote in a message to William Mcbrine:

WM> DC> static char *books[30] = {"moby dick",
"annie", etc};

WM>That's an array of pointers to constant strings. You can't read into it.

Correct.

 GW> That is an initialised array of strings of varying length

No, the right to left rule says:

books is an array (size 30) of pointers to char, with static qualifier

 GW> You _can_ write to them, but it's a dangerous occupation since they
 GW> have the length of the string they were initialised with and so
 GW> vary in length. 

Writing to string literals, even without overwriting their bounds, will
fail miserably on many systems, even on plain DOS compilers when for
example the 'merge duplicate strings' or similar option is enabled.

greetings,
Tom
tomtorfs{at}village.uunet.be

--- timEd/2 1.10.y2k+