c++ - Why does (i|o)fstream take a const char* parameter for a file name?

Question

Why does the constructor and open method of the std::(i|o)fstream classes take the name of a file as a parameter in the form of a const char* instead of an std::string? It seems like the creators of the STL would want to use what they had written instead of using the type they wrote a class to replace.

Answer 1

The string part of the library was developed after streams, and nobody thought to make the obvious modifications.

It's merely out of political and temporal reality that they never got around to this before shipping C++98, and nobody bothered bringing it up again because you could always solve it with .c_str().

C++0x fixes this (see 27.9.1.6).

Welcome to C++.