The best reference is the source code. Let's look at the string. In C/C++ there is no reliable and portable way for your program to find out whether some (char

The best reference is the source code. Let's look at the string. In C/C++ there is no reliable and portable way for your program to find out whether some (char*) points to a constant string literal or not. So the only oprion for a dynamic string implementation is to always copy any data the constructor receives to somewhere else, normally to the dynamic memory. As a result, any initialization involves dynamic allocation and copying of data in C++. At the same time languages that have built-in support for dynamic structures avoid this by creating proper structures in the constant segment. So a statement like string s = "abc" would do nothing but assign a pointer. This is a huge problem in C++ and even C++0x doesn't solve it unfortunately.