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From: karl@haddock
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: void*
Message-ID: <86900014@haddock>
Date: Fri, 15-Aug-86 17:41:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: haddock.86900014
Posted: Fri Aug 15 17:41:00 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 17-Aug-86 07:29:02 EDT
References: <5937@alice.uUCp>
Lines: 20
Nf-ID: #R:alice.uUCp:5937:haddock:86900014:000:1074
Nf-From: haddock!karl    Aug 15 17:41:00 1986


alice!bs (Bjarne Stroustrup) writes:
>In addition, the draft ANSI C proposal allows uncasted assignment of a void*
>to a non-void pointer. This, I consider to be an unnecessary weakening of C's
>type system; in the long run it will become a rather serious nuiscance.

I agree that this is a bad idea; I'm glad to hear that C++ disallows it.  If
you don't want to cast the result of malloc(), it's easy to hide it in macros
(I've been doing it for years):
	#define new(type)       ((type *)malloc(sizeof(type)))
	#define nnew(n, type)   ((type *)malloc((n)*sizeof(type)))
This does restrict "type" to something you can add "*" to, though.

Having said that, I'll now point out that X3J11 draft 01-May-1986 does say in
5.5 (Common Warnings), "[An implementation may generate a warning if] an
implicit narrowing conversion is encountered, such as the assignment of ...
a pointer to void to a pointer to any type of object other than char."  This
implies that such an uncasted assignment should be avoided, at least.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ihnp4!ima!haddock!karl), The Walking Lint