Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 20:26:45 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>, Aviast@yahoo.com Cc: freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: casting functions to (void) Message-ID: <p05101221b87e4843719c@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <200201302216.g0UMG1Y64367@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20020130094110.16065.qmail@web14606.mail.yahoo.com> <200201302216.g0UMG1Y64367@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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At 5:16 PM -0500 1/30/02, Garrett Wollman wrote: ><<On Wed, 30 Jan 2002 Michael Henry <aviast@yahoo.com> said: > >> On another point: what is the general consensus on casting >> functions to void? > >I am of the opinion that it is silly. Other reasonable people >disagree. (I happen to think that their reasons for disagreement >are the result of inadequate tools, and the appropriate response >is to fix the tool, not kluge up the source code.) Speaking only to my own preference, I think it's worth doing in the case where the function is returning some error indication, and I "mean to" add code to check that error value at some point in the (indefinite) future. Later, if I'm trying to track down some mysterious bug in that code, the (void) will stand out as a good place to add more sanity-checks. I think it's nuts on things like strcpy(), where I know the function is returning a value, but that value is not needed by anything the code is doing. In that case, the (void) seems like noise which just clutters up the code. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the message
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