From: John Beckett 

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 19:13:19 -0500, "Geo"  wrote:
>Why wouldn't it work for strings? Strings are just arrays of characters and
>a character is simply a value like an int is a value.

I hope you realise that Tony's suggestion:
     x ^= y ^= x ^= y;
was very tongue-in-cheek.

It is old folk lore that this magnificent code will swap the contents of x
and y, and programmers talk of days when such tricks were needed to
minimise use of data memory (particularly stack memory), at the expense of
code memory.

I'm not sure whether anyone ever actually needed to use this code.

The ^ (bitwise xor) operator is only defined for integer variables. It is
probably illegal (compiler error) with float or string.

The trick (if not illegal) would have to fail for strings because the code
operates on the contents of x and y. For a string, the "contents"
would actually be an address that points to some data structure holding the
actual string.

You could argue that a more clever language would know that the TRUE
contents of a string was the actual characters, but C/C++ is not like that.
Xor is supported in so far as the CPU supports it.

John

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