:-) Kind of funny you should suggest that, because that's almost exactly what we have today. Once our string type has copied data from a buffer, then it is ref-counted to avoid further copies. We have a means to specify that the input string is a literal quoted string, in which case no copy of the string data is made at all (and ref-counting is not needed). However in most cases programmers seem to use the version that copies string data even when they're supplying a literal quoted string. No reason other than they have other things on their mind when writing code, and don't seem to remember such details. So my goal was to detect this and either automatically be more efficient, or give them a compiler error that forces them to use the more efficient version. As an update I've found I can use "const" to detect the use of a non-literal buffer in some cases, but not all. For example: char buff[100]; ... StringClass s1(buff); // Works: will use the non-const constructor and will copy. const char* ptr = ...; // possibly points at some local temp buffer StringClass s2(ptr); // Can't distinguish between this case... StringClass s3("hello"); //... and this case So I would like to distinguish between the s2 and the s3 case (the s2 case should be copied since there's no telling where the pointer is pointing, and the s3 case should not be copied). I don't think C++ is going to let me do that. Thanks for the ideas...
