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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T11:44:13+00:00

I was just skimming the C99 standard, looking for something that I don’t remember

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I was just skimming the C99 standard, looking for something that I don’t remember now, when I noticed that the pointer returned from the strerror() function (section 7.12.6.2) isn’t const-qualified, even though the standard says:

The strerror function returns a pointer to the string, the contents of which are
locale-specific. The array pointed to shall not be modified by the program,
but may be overwritten by a subsequent call to the strerror function.

Is there an obvious reason for this function to return a modifiable string instead of something like:

char const * const strerror(int errnum);

or at the very least

char const * strerror(int errnum);
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Same as for the type of string literals: It was already like that in C89, describing a practice dating back to before the introduction of const in the language. Changing it would make current valid program invalid.

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