Re: Quick question on Glib style/design

[Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com>]

On Tue, 2004-03-08 at 07:46 -0400, muppet wrote:

[snip]
> 
> but this is also, in general, Not A Good Thing as you have totally 
> sidestepped the compiler's type checking.  for example, image somebody 

But to me it seems as if Glib totally side-stepped C type checking
anyways, since everything needs to be cast anyways.

> tries to pass a Flurble* to foo_bar() --- it will take quite a bit of 
> swimming through headers to find that it's the wrong type (even with 
> the void* declaration you described above), because the compiler will 
> not complain at all about the bad type.

But thats true anyways since I can run foo_bar (FLURBLE(obj)) and it
will work just fine, no? And I don't think its overly confusing since
the type-cast is totally redundant information anyways:

g_collection_begin (COLLECTION (list))

states that this function only works on collections twice. Any
programmer would have to know that collection<-list.

> 
> if you have
> 
>     void foo_bar (Foo * f);
> 
> and you want to pass a Bar* to it, you are instantly reminded that the 
> Bar needs to derive from a Foo.  this is idiomatic to C and especially 
> to GLib.
> 

For the time being I won't change anything, but get back to doing some
real development.

Thanks to everyone who gave me such good info!!

Cheers,
Ryan