Ziglings Exercise 6 String Concatenation

[sleek turtle]

How come

    const major = "Major";
    const tom = "Tom";
    const major_tom = major ++ " " ++ tom;

works but

    const major = "Major";
    const tom = "Tom";
    const major_tom = major ++ ' ' ++ tom;

doesn't work? A space is a single character so I thought to use a character type instead of a double quotes

Even this

    const major_tom = major ++ [_]u8{' '} ++ tom;

doesn't work. Why?

Why don't the last 2 solutions work? I (think I) understand why the first solution works and passes.

[topaz steppe]

the last will work if you stick an & before the [_]

you can concatenate arrays or pointers to arrays, but you can't mix the two

as for the middle example, it doesn't work because array concatenation doesn't work on scalars

you need both sides to be an array or pointer to array (or comptime known slice)

[sleek turtle]

i havent gotten to the part of pointers or scalars. i know the concept of pointers from C. I thought strings were just an array of characters which are numbers ig (u8). and turns out i was reading something wrong because [_]u8{' '} does work. The only one that doesn't work is major ++ ' ' ++ tom which I understand why it doesn't work because its not in an array format i guess. I checked the exercise specifically.

[topaz steppe]

string literal is a pointer to an array

which implicitly coerces to a slice

but it's still a pointer either way

by "scalar" I just meant a lone u8

instead of a u8 that is inside of an array

[sleek turtle]

Pretty sure I understand it now: "foo" ++ ' ' ++ "bar" won't work because ' ' isn't an array or string, its just a number and the ++ (concatenation) operator only works on arrays (incl. strings bc strings are just arrays of characters, which characters are just numbers)