I guess you could think of it as an "implicit type". I prefer to think of it as a data format rather than a data type. (It doesn't satisfy the meaning of "type"

I guess you could think of it as an "implicit type". I prefer to think of it as a data format rather than a data type. (It doesn't satisfy the meaning of "type" as C defines the word.) char[n] (for constant n) is an array type. An object of type char[n] may or may not contain a string.