On Monday, 20 January 2025 at 19:54:19 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Monday, January 20, 2025 12:03:09 PM MST DLearner via
Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
// In the code below, what fn needs to go in the commented-out
line,
// to make the program print 7, 11 rather than 7, 7?
```
void main() {
import std.stdio;
int IntVar1 = 5;
int IntVar2 = 7;
int IntVar3 = 11;
int* wkVarAddr;
char[] wkVarName;
wkVarAddr = &IntVar2;
writeln("*wkVarAddr = ", *wkVarAddr);
wkVarName = cast(char[])("IntVar3");
// wkVarAddr = fn (wkVarName);
writeln("*wkVarAddr = ", *wkVarAddr);
}
```
Variable names are not a thing at runtime.
[...]
But the language isn't going to do anything like that for you
automatically.
Agreed, I need to think about this further.
Also, there's really no reason to be doing anything with char[]
instead of string
[...]
If you _do_ need to mutate the string for some
reason, then use dup to get a mutable copy rather than casting
the literal, e.g.
char[] wkVarName = "IntVar3".dup;
The reason for using char[] wasn't because there was a need to
mutate the elements.
It was because my understanding was that in certain situations
the string construct did not just produce a character array - it
also produced the (to me horrible) concept of adding a x'00'
immediately after the last character of the array.
Which could produce problems on concatenation, and doubt about
the length of the string.
char[] just worked properly.
- Jonathan M Davis
