Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: legality of assignment of function to a void *.
Message-ID: <1990Nov17.042425.7388@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Nov12.211511.2344@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <1990Nov13.174920.2235@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov14.031125.14027@athena.mit.edu> <4e0cac89.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 90 04:24:25 GMT

In article <4e0cac89.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> blodgett@apollo.HP.COM (Bruce Blodgett) writes:
>Was it really the intent of the ANSI C committee not to allow void
>pointers from holding uncasted function addresses (in either
>conforming or strictly conforming programs)?

Yes.  A void pointer, for compatibility reasons, is constrained to have
the same representation as a character pointer.  Pick a sufficiently
outre' machine, and function pointers may well be bizarre and complex
objects too large to fit in any reasonable data pointer.  A function
pointer is **not** (necessarily) the address of the function; functions
may not even have "addresses" in any simple sense, and calling a function
may require considerably more information than just where to find the code.
-- 
"I don't *want* to be normal!"         | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
"Not to worry."                        |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry