C++ lifetime of a dangling string

Question

In C, you can write

const char *result = "AB";

Is this style supported in C++ by standard? Is the life-time of this constant string guaranteed along with the same scope of the pointer?

Answer 1

Literals string constants have a lifetime of the whole program, and the arrays the strings are stored in never go out of scope.

Note that there's a semantic difference between literal strings in C and C++: In C++ literal strings are stored in arrays of constant characters (therefore the const in const char* is needed). In C they aren't constant arrays (so char * is alright in C). However, it's not allowed to modify a literal string in C, which makes them read only (but not constant).