Is it legal to write to std::string?

Question

In std::string there are only const members to fetch the data like c_str(). However I can get a reference to the first element of the string via operator[] and

Answer 1

As it has been pointed-out, one can use strings in algorithms that use iterators; the same case can be implemented using std::transform Ex:- consider a string 's' to be converted to lower case:

int (*pf)(int)=tolower; //lowercase
std::transform(s.begin(), s.end(), s.begin(), pf); 

Regards,