Passing text/strings as a byte ptr?

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Passing text/strings as a byte ptr?

Oh, and does anyone know why I can pass a string in to a function expecting a byte pointer, and it works - yet Bmax does not automatically convert a String to a byte pointer anywhere else...i.e.
str:string
bptr:byte ptr
bptr = string


returns the error "Unable to convert string to byte pointer."