[billforsternz]

C strings are performant but place a lot of responsibility on the programmer. C++ strings offer a more accessible, less lightweight but easier to use facility. Rather typically of higher level string abstractions that are standard in non C languages (and which can be constructed as library functions in C), they rely on memory allocation and so will often be less performant.

By little example is basically the strcpy() standard facility. Maybe a better example would be a construct that (roughly) could replace memcpy();

  while( n-- )
    *dst++ = *src++;

This sort of thing just appeals to me as being simple and obvious computing - there's no cleverness to it - and certainly no need to break it down exhaustively to understand it. I think whether this sort of thing appeals might have something to do with prior experience - in my case as an engineer and assembly language programmer;

The equivalent to my memcpy() snippet on the original x86 machines was simply this;

  rep movsb

Put the count in cx, the source ptr in si, the dest ptr in di and the REP prefix will repeat the MOVE STRING BYTE instruction and decrementing cx each time until it hits zero.