Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Operations on pointers to void.
Message-ID: <1990Aug13.172104.16172@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug9.231614.5196@basho.uucp> <1990Aug10.165644.9238@zoo.toronto.edu> <482@array.UUCP> <1990Aug12.231202.23826@druid.uucp>
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 90 17:21:04 GMT

In article <1990Aug12.231202.23826@druid.uucp> darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>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...

It's called `char *'. :-)  The various tricky implementations in which it
would not be a valid "generic pointer" have pretty well all been outlawed
by various rules in ANSI C.  Note that `void *' and `char *' are constrained
to have the same representation.
-- 
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