String addition?

Question

So a question in a C++ challenge asked what the output of cout << 1 + "hello"; (or whatever the string was, it's not important) would be, I went to find out and the output was "ello"

Why?

Answer 1

"hello"'s type is const char *.

Pointer's pointing to first letter.

+1: second letter.

Answer 2

This is something called pointer arithmetics... When you define a literal string, compiler get you a pointer to a sequence of characters in memory. This pointer is an adress, a number, and as such you can add numbers to it. Adding a number here mean "get the adress of char advancing by i chars"