Why doesn't std::string provide implicit conversion to char*?

Question

std::string provides const char* c_str ( ) const which:

Get C string equivalent

Generates a null-terminated sequence of cha

Answer 1

That's probably because this conversion would have surprising and peculiar semantics. Particularly, the fourth paragraph you quote.

Another reason is that there is an implicit conversion const char* -> string, and this would be just the converse, which would mean strange behavior wrt overload resolution (you shouldn't make both implicit conversions A->B and B->A).