Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!spdcc!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Why use (void) func() ?
Message-ID: <18179@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 24 Sep 90 23:31:20 GMT
References: <586@dptechno.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@kelp.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Cambridge, MA 02138-5302
Lines: 11

In article <586@dptechno.UUCP> dave@dptechno.uucp (Dave Lee) writes:
>Why should I go to the extra trouble to [explicitly cast to void]?

To distinguish between "This call might fail, but I don't know what I should
do about it" (uncast) and "This call might fail, but the appropriate recovery
operation is a NOP" (cast).  An example of the former is most programs' use of
putchar() or printf().  An example of the latter is unlink(t) in a cleanup
routine where t is a temp file that may or may not exist at this point, or the
fprintf(stderr, ...) issued from a panic routine just before exiting.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@kelp.ima.isc.com or ima!kelp!karl), The Walking Lint