On Mon, Jul 03, 2000 at 10:23:15PM -0400, Michael Meissner wrote:
> ISO C mandates void * being bit identical to char *. Void * in fact started
> out in life as a proposal for two concepts, one of which was the general
> pointer type that could point to anything (IIRC including functions), and the
> other for the return type of malloc and friends, which says that the pointer is
> guaranteed to be sufficiently aligned to hold any data type. Along the way,
> the requirement that the generic pointer hold function addresses was dropped,
> and the explicit type for the aligned pointer was dropped.
Also the original proposal did not require void * be bit identical with char *.
That came later to be backwards compatible with the existing library.
-- Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc. PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA Work: meissner@redhat.com phone: +1 978-486-9304 Non-work: meissner@spectacle-pond.org fax: +1 978-692-4482- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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