Why allow concatenation of string literals?

Question

I was recently bitten by a subtle bug.

char ** int2str = {
   \"zero\", // 0
   \"one\",  // 1
   \"two\"   // 2
   \"three\",// 3
   nullptr };

assert( int         


        

Answer 1

I'm not sure about other programming languages, but for example C# doesn't allow you to do this (and I think this is a good thing). As far as I can tell, most of the examples that show why this is useful in C++ would still work if you could use some special operator for string concatenation:

string someGlobalString = "very long " +
                          "so broken " +
                          "onto multiple " +
                          "lines"; 

This may not be as comfortable, but it is certainly safer. In your motivating example, the code would be invalid unless you added either , to separate elements or + to concatenate strings...