Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!uunet!taumet!steve
From: steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Operations on pointers to void.
Message-ID: <397@taumet.com>
Date: 10 Aug 90 15:37:16 GMT
References: <1990Aug9.231614.5196@basho.uucp>
Organization: Taumetric Corporation, San Diego
Lines: 19

john@basho.uucp (John Lacey) writes:

>What operations are legal on pointers to void?  ...

You may cast to or from type void*.
You may assign, initialize, or pass as a parameter any pointer to an object
of type void*, and vice versa.
You may not dereference an object of type void*.

>But, what about pointer arithmetic?  And it that is legal, what size object
>does a void * point to?

You cannot do pointer arithmetic with an object of void*.  No object may
have type void, so no size can be associated with it.  It is helpful
to think of void as "not anything", rather than "zero".  Void* is a
special case, and you can think of it as "pointing to something unspecified".
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com