The arguments argc and argv of main is used as a way to send arguments to a program, the possibly most familiar way is to use the good ol’ terminal where a user could type cat file. Here the word cat is a program that takes a file and outputs it to standard output (stdout). … Read more
In this case, history is a factor. C defined these inputs as “not constant”, and compatibility with (a good portion of) existing C code was an early goal of C++. Some UNIX APIs, such as getopt, actually do manipulate argv[], so it can’t be made const for that reason also. (Aside: Interestingly, although getopt‘s prototype … Read more
argv and argc are how command line arguments are passed to main() in C and C++. argc will be the number of strings pointed to by argv. This will (in practice) be 1 plus the number of arguments, as virtually all implementations will prepend the name of the program to the array. The variables are … Read more