Operations on pointers to void.

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1990Aug12.231202.23826 at druid.uucp> darcy at druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>I'll buy the argument about -pedantic but in general I think it is useful
>to be able to manipulate generic data.  Things like memcpy for example.  We
>know that the data can be any type but we want to treat it as bytes.  Perhaps
>we need a new type which acts like void * but allows pointer arithmetic based
>on the smallest data type supported by the system...

It's called `char *'. :-)  The various tricky implementations in which it
would not be a valid "generic pointer" have pretty well all been outlawed
by various rules in ANSI C.  Note that `void *' and `char *' are constrained
to have the same representation.
-- 
It is not possible to both understand  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and appreciate Intel CPUs. -D.Wolfskill|  henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry