Eh, I like my C idioms. With C++ it's easy to make it safe so that accessing an unassigned string doesn't cause a crash (make NULL equivalent to empty strings

Eh, I like my C idioms. With C++ it's easy to make it safe so that accessing an unassigned string doesn't cause a crash (make NULL equivalent to empty strings except for tests). I have the same gripe with the way the STL is designed. Too tedious to test for empty first before reading an item.