Unexpected C/C++ string behaviour

This is a fun one. Take the following mini C++ program:

#include <iostream>      using namespace std;

int main() {        cout << "abcdefgh" + 0 << endl;        cout << "abcdefgh" + 1 << endl;        cout << "abcdefgh"

• 2 << endl; cout << "abcdefgh" + 3 << endl; cout << "abcdefgh" + 4 << endl; cout << "abcdefgh" + 8 << endl; return EXIT_SUCCESS; }

What happens? Well, at first glance you'd think that the output will be a list of concatenated strings like abcdefgh0, abcdefgh1 etc. After all, that's a pretty common idiom in just about every language that's more sophisticated than PDP11 assembler... oh, hang on, C/C++ is PDP11 assembler in disguise. So these string literals won't behave like std::string --- they'll probably do something evil. And so it comes to pass:

buckley@d18:~/tmp/cc$ g++ -o teststradd teststradd.cc      buckley@d18:~/tmp/cc$ ./teststradd       abcdefgh

bcdefgh cdefgh defgh efgh (empty line)

I expected something evil, but this particular behaviour was a surprise: the first n characters are removed. What's actually going on is that the string literal is a const char* pointer, and the +n is incrementing that pointer by n units. The printout then starts at the offset and writes until it finds the terminating null character!

So much for the reason --- the main point is: WTF?!? One more reason to relegate C++ to purely system tasks like writing memory managers, device drivers and other bit-wrangling tools. Once strings, UIs and all that stuff get involved, we should be carefully segregating the C++ to places where it can't do any harm, and using Java, Python, D... or whatever for the touchy-feely stuff.