[Mesa-dev] rationale for GLubyte pointers for strings?

[tom fogal]

Hi all,

This isn't quite the right place for this question, but I've searched
through old standards and googled without any luck, so hopefully
somebody here knows the history behind GLubyte*.

glGetString and gluErrorString, plus maybe some other functions, return
GLubyte pointers instead of simply character pointers.  I can't imagine
an implementation does anything else internally other than use const
char*'s and cast them to the type the interface requires.

What's the rationale here?  It appears to me to be a desire of GL to
avoid depending on the std C library, but types, especially char, are
part of the standard, the compiler.

Anyone know the history here?

Thanks,

-tom