Re: Cast abuse

[Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>]

On 19/11 2001 12:18 Brian Stafford wrote:
> Just pulled the latest balsa from CVS and got problems compiling 
> address-book-ldap.c.  The problem is that casts are used to abuse const 
> strings. Fortunately gcc catches this nonsense and warns about it.
> 
> <rant>
> As a general point, I feel that when programming in C, if a cast is 
> used, something is wrong in the code.  All reasonable efforts should be 
> made to rewrite the code avoiding the cast.  Use casts only as a last 
> resort, after all a cast silences the compiler about potential coding 
> errors.  Also remember that void pointers eliminate the need for a lot 
> of casts, e.g. code like "ptr = (int *) malloc(..." is always 
> unnecessary since malloc returns a void *.  Just write "ptr = 
> malloc(...".  The same goes for comparisons with void pointers, forget 
> the cast.
> </rant>
Can the str...() declarations be assumed to use "const" properly on all 
platforms? I seem to remember that _all_ string arguments had type "char 
*" on some of our systems in a not-to-distant past.

- Toralf