auto with array of strings (BUG?)

[BCS]

Reply to Jarrett,

> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Justin<mrjnewt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I was writing some unittests when I ran across some rather unexpected
>> behavior in which strings in an array were being trimmed to the
>> length of the first element. Running this program:
>> 
>> import std.stdio;
>> void main() {
>> auto strings = ["hello", "cruelly", "innovative", "world"];
>> writefln(strings);
>> }
>> produces this:
>> [[h,e,l,l,o],[c,r,u,e,l],[i,n,n,o,v],[w,o,r,l,d]]
>> as the compiler decides to make the strings variable an array of
>> char[5u]. The problem is easily avoided by replacing auto with
>> string[], but the problem caught me off guard while working in the
>> one place where I regularly use auto: unittests.
>> 
>> Is there a reason that the compiler makes the assumptions it does or
>> is this a bug? I did try searching the bugzilla with a few different
>> queries, but failed to turn up anything that looked likely.
>> 
> There's two annoying things going on here:
> 
> 1) The type of string literals is not char[], it's char[n] where n is
> the length of the string.  I don't know why this is.
> 2) With array literals, the compiler simply determines the type of the
> array as being a dynamic array of the type of the first element,
> rather than making it an array of the common type of all the elements.
> That being said I have no idea why the compiler is allowing "cruelly",
> which is of type char[7], to be implicitly converted to char[5].  I
> thought that was not legit.
> 

the solution is to use

auto strings = ["hello"[], "cruelly", "innovative", "world"];