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From: "Claudio Bley" <bley@cs.uni-magdeburg.de>
To: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
Cc: "Joshua Nye" <josh@boxcarmedia.com>,
	"Steve Dondley" <s@dondley.com>, <gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Avoiding "assignment from incompatible pointer type" warning
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 06:48:00 -0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <15796.1484.410694.966062@wh2-19.st.uni-magdeburg.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87hefguj01.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>

>>>>> "Florian" == Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:

    Florian> "Claudio Bley" <bley@cs.uni-magdeburg.de> writes:
    >> >> What do you consider legal and why wouldn't it be?
    >> 
    Florian> Casting a pointer from float to int can result in
    Florian> undefined behavior on some implementations.
    >>  I can't see why. Can you elaborate on that?

    Florian> Well, it's all in the standard, although it's a bit
    Florian> scattered.

    >> I mean, casting on the machine code level does just nothing -
    >> it's just "syntactic sugar" to convince the compiler to be
    >> quiet.

    Florian> It's not.  In C, pointers are NOT machine addresses.
    Florian> Pointers are an abstract concept, and often, something
    Florian> which would work if they were machine addresses, fails
    Florian> miserably.  For example, even if two pointers compare
    Florian> equal (because they point to the same object), it's
    Florian> possible that an operation on one of the two is
    Florian> undefined, while it is defined for the other one.

    >> I think casting from one pointer type to another does no harm
    >> at all. Am I wrong?

    Florian> Yes, you are, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid too! ;-) Really. I'm using C for quite a while now, read a
few books but I never realized that. I was thinking that a cast just
meant "pretend these bits have a different type, and treat them
accordingly". Also, as Mathew Moore mentioned, I was not thinking
about alignment issues. 

Regards.
-- 
Claudio Bley                                 ASCII ribbon campaign (")
Debian GNU/Linux advocate                     - against HTML email  X 
http://www.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~bley/                     & vCards / \

  reply	other threads:[~2002-10-21 13:48 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2002-10-13  9:08 Steve Dondley
2002-10-13  9:28 ` Joshua Nye
2002-10-13  9:34   ` Steve Dondley
2002-10-13 15:09   ` Florian Weimer
2002-10-13 15:19     ` Joshua Nye
2002-10-15 11:24     ` Joshua Nye
2002-10-21  3:12       ` Florian Weimer
2002-10-21  4:22         ` Claudio Bley
2002-10-21  4:30           ` Florian Weimer
2002-10-21  6:48             ` Claudio Bley [this message]
2002-10-21  4:42           ` Sebastian Huber
2002-10-21  6:43           ` John Love-Jensen
2002-10-21  6:52             ` Florian Weimer
2002-10-13 13:37 Moore, Mathew L
2002-10-13 15:10 ` Florian Weimer
2002-10-21  6:07 Moore, Mathew L
2002-10-21  7:04 Moore, Mathew L
2002-10-21  7:17 ` Florian Weimer
2002-10-21  7:43   ` John Love-Jensen

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