Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Operations on pointers to void.
Message-ID: <1990Aug10.165644.9238@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug9.231614.5196@basho.uucp>
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 90 16:56:44 GMT

In article <1990Aug9.231614.5196@basho.uucp> john@basho.uucp (John Lacey) writes:
>... dereferencing and subscripting are illegal.
>But, what about pointer arithmetic? ...

Subscripting *is* pointer arithmetic.  Apart from passing them around and
comparing them to each other and to NULL, there is *nothing* you can do
with `void *'s except convert them to another kind of pointer.  No
dereferencing, no arithmetic.  They are containers for other kinds of
pointers, not pointers themselves.

Many compilers, especially old ones with `void *' hastily kludged in,
treat `void *' much like `char *'.  That is a compiler bug.
-- 
It is not possible to both understand  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and appreciate Intel CPUs. -D.Wolfskill|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry