To me, the operation of copying a portion of a string out to a
caller-allocated area does not imply any need to modify the string.
Additionally, I cannot find any part of the P.J. Plauger implementation
for string.copy() that would necessitate casting away const on this.
Could somebody please enlighten me as to the rationale for this decision?

Robert Coie                              rac@intrigue.com
Implementor, Intrigue Corporation     AppleLink: INTRIGUE