Forgive my ignorance, but I actually did not find anything in the style guide to forbid the above. Unless I missed that part, I'd really like to keep it this way, since the strings are part of the interface. We don't want to redefine them in every implementation file, and keep them in sync. It is standard C++ practice, the strings get allocated and destroyed properly. Doing the proposed way is less readable, more difficult to maintain, and more error prone. Maybe there is justification for it, but I didn't find it in the style guide (http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml and http://www.chromium.org/developers/coding-style).