If you're going to talk about C strings, I think it's a bad idea to start people off with the traditional char array. It teaches them bad habits right off the bat, and nobody needs yet another bad habit. We don't live in that world anymore, and so wchar_t arrays are called for... I'd probably just eliminate the 'string' talk altogether, because unfortunately, there are just too many different ways of manipulating the string concept in the C/C++ world.