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From: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.pyramid
Subject: Re: Where are you malloc? I loc you still.  Where are you?
Message-ID: <86859@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Date: 7 Oct 89 17:15:55 GMT
References: <86743@pyramid.pyramid.com> <4624@ncar.ucar.edu>
Reply-To: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst)
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 21

>>Now, if you want to know why *Berkeley* didn't put a declaration of malloc(3)
>>in some convenient header file, I haven't any idea. But I agree it would be a
>>good idea.
>
>Here's a guess: What would you declare it as?

You'd declare it as a its declared type: char *. Anything else would be wrong.

>But even though perhaps 75% of the time you are allocating a character
>string, 25% of the time you're allocating some other data type, most likely
>a structure. So to keep cc from complaining, you gotta cast the output of
>malloc into another type, e.g. "(struct node *)malloc".

Yup. And that is the *ONLY* correct way to do it. Those of us living on nice
contiguous memory, byte-addressable architectures have gotten terribly spoiled
by the fact that pointers are the same, no matter what they are pointing to.
But that ain't the case everywhere. malloc(3) returns a char *. If you are on
the wrong machine (Sperry 2200 and Cyber come to mind), and you simply declare
malloc() are something else, you software will crash and burn.

<csg>