For many years the best language(s) experts have been trying to have compile time and run time strings live together happily ever. They come tantalizingly close but don't quite succeeded. Maybe it is time to entertain the idea that even if compile and run time strings look so similar as to be almost the same - maybe they are not? Maybe they are actually more dissimilar than they appear? Compile time strings to me look more like symbols table: strings unique and ideally sorted. The offset can be a handle - then uniqueness means we can == or != compare handles rather than strings. If the table is sorted, then < > <= >= compares of symbols via their offsets just works too.