Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!hybrid!robohack!druid!darcy
From: darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Operations on pointers to void.
Message-ID: <1990Aug12.231202.23826@druid.uucp>
Date: 12 Aug 90 23:12:02 GMT
References: <1990Aug9.231614.5196@basho.uucp> <1990Aug10.165644.9238@zoo.toronto.edu> <482@array.UUCP>
Organization: D'Arcy Cain Consulting, West Hill, Ontario
Lines: 21

In article <482@array.UUCP> colin@array.UUCP (Colin Plumb) writes:
>In article <1990Aug10.165644.9238@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> Many compilers, especially old ones with `void *' hastily kludged in,
>> treat `void *' much like `char *'.  That is a compiler bug.
>
>Actually, gcc documents its permission of pointer arithmetic on void *
>as a feature.  I disagree.  Certainly -ansi -pedantic should complain
>about the extension.

I'll buy the argument about -pedantic but in general I think it is useful
to be able to manipulate generic data.  Things like memcpy for example.  We
know that the data can be any type but we want to treat it as bytes.  Perhaps
we need a new type which acts like void * but allows pointer arithmetic based
on the smallest data type supported by the system, usually (but not always)
a byte.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid)     |
D'Arcy Cain Consulting             |   MS-DOS:  The Andrew Dice Clay
West Hill, Ontario, Canada         |   of operating systems.
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