I actually think CS 106’s string libraries are a good idea, because it allows them to work with strings from the beginning, without having to understand the lower level stuff. And honestly, strings in C are ugly. Anyway, Eric’s concern shouldn’t even come up, if the section leader is doing his job – students should be using only the CS 106 string functions, not the built in <string.h>
functions. So, you wouldn’t use strcat()
, you’d use Concat()
. Then you don’t get those problems. And you can learn about heap allocation later, when you need to.