Syntax of reference pages

[timheyes]

Could someone help me understand the syntax of functions on the refernce pages? e.g.

The atoi() reference page has this underneath the title,

int atoi ( const char * str );

In order to convert the string to an interger variable I understand that I can simply stick the string variable into the brackets and assign it to an integer variable, i.e.

int ivariable = atoi (svariable);

But what does the "const char *" bit tell me?

Thanks any help.

[Cubbi]

it tells you that svariable must have the type const char * or a type that is implicitly convertible to const char * (which includes char*, const char[N], char[N]).

The function call won't compile if svaraible is anything else (e.g. int or std::string)