> Is it, as I guess, that the first is more correct than the second?

Exactly.

> That is, it would be possible to write a program which tried to modify
> the strings of sys_errlist -- for the first proto it would fail, but
> for the second it would compile just fine (provided you're doing gcc
> -Wall). 

It would compile fine, but would dump core when running.  In my opinion, A 
compile error is better than a run time error.

	--jtc

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