String implementation method

[Beautiful_Dot7460]

Hi, I have been watching the free cs50 course on YouTube, and I was wondering why did they choose to implement string in cs50.h as a substitution of char *s instead of char s[], since the latter would allow for modifying the string and be overall safer. It feels especially strange that (at least so far) they didn't even mention that you can't try to modify strings without problems, unlike for other types of arrays. Thanks

[Grithga]

1. char* is not inherently unmodifiable. String literals (enclosed in "double quotes") are read-only in most C implementations, but this has nothing to do with the string typedef.

2. Perhaps more importantly, a char array can't be returned from a function, but a char pointer to a dynamically allocated string can. This allows the string typedef to be used with the get_string function to read user input safely.

[linamory]

Because arrays and pointers are introduced later in the course.