On Apr 10, 11:54am, marti...@google.com (Martin Buchholz) wrote: -- Subject: Re: RFR-8008118
| > 1. We did we switch from NEW() to xmalloc()? Why is the xmalloc cast | > needed? | | NEW is for allocating homogeneous arrays, but here the memory block is | being used for both chars and pointers. I did not know that. Why the cast though? xmalloc() returns void *, no? Extraneous casts are bad because they hide conversion errors. For example, if you don't have the xmalloc prototype in scope, without the cast you get a warning of casting integer to pointer of different size. With the cast you get the wrong data assigned to the pointer. | > 2. I would not declare pathv "const char **", but "char **", and then | > cast the return if needed. This will make life easier in the future | > if we decide to turn on warnings about const-castaways. | > | > | I believe the current code doesn't cast away const and doesn't write to | const. The only cast is to the return from xmalloc, which is expected. | What might a compiler warn about? It is casting away const before the memcpy: + p = (char *) pathv + pathvsize; Try to compile with -Wcast-qual. christos
