On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 06:23 +0100, Javier Jardón wrote: > The question: why is it normal for GTK widget "constructors" to return > GtkWidget and not their real type? > > For instance I would expect: > > gtk_menu_item_new () > > To return GtkMenuItem*. But it doesn't, it returns GtkWidget*. > IMHO is much clear that constructors return their real type, instead > GtkWidget. But maybe there is a technical reason for this.
Almost invariably you're going to be doing something with the return value as a GtkWidget, such as calling gtk_widget_show() on it or packing it into a container. If that method above returned GtkMenuItem* then that guarantees a cast, whereas if it returns a GtkWidget* then it may just get packed into a container and that's the end of it. _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
