Compilation of string literals

Question

Why can two string literals separated by a space, tab or \"\\n\" be compiled without an error?

int main()
{
   char * a = \"aaaa\"  \"bbbb\";
} 

Answer 1

If you see e.g. this translation phase reference in phase 6 it does:

Adjacent string literals are concatenated.

And that's exactly what happens here. You have two adjacent string literals, and they are concatenated into a single string literal.

It is standard behavior.

It only works for string literals, not two pointer variables, as you noticed.