Not exactly a compiler bug, but Borland Turbo C (which predates ANSI C) had bizarre semantics around character pointers such that char *s was almost a managed s

Not exactly a compiler bug, but Borland Turbo C (which predates ANSI C) had bizarre semantics around character pointers such that char *s was almost a managed string type, and assignment would make a deep copy of the string.... much to the surprise of anyone expecting identical addresses. The manual maybe (?) hints at this behavior: > Using a Character Pointer > The second method you can use to define strings is a character pointer. Edit your program to look like this: main () { char *msg; msg = "Hello, world"; puts(msg); } > The asterisk (*) in front of msg tells the compiler that msg is a pointer to a character; in other words, msg can hold the address of some character. However, the compiler sets aside no space to store characters and does not initialize msg to any particular value. > When the compiler finds the statement msg = "Hello, world\n"; it does two things: - As before, it creates the string "Hello, world\n", followed by a null character somewhere within the object code file. - It assigns to the starting address of that string-the address of the character H-to msg. > The command puts(msg) works just as it did before, printing characters until it encounters the null character. The workaround is of course to use s1 = &s2[0]