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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:14:50 -0500
From: Gareth Owen <gwowen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: is there anything unstandard in the c part here
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Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.c:9330

James Kuyper <jameskuyper@verizon.net> writes:

> Being more direct won't help. He's been repeatedly asked to provide an
> example, and so far the only bug he's presented would have remained a
> bug, and remained hidden, even after the cast was "corrected", so it was
> clearly not the cast which was hiding the bug.

Stop being a dick, James. The bug becomes a compile time error.

float * foo;
// elision
foo = (float*) malloc(256*sizeof(float));

becomes

double * foo;
foo = (float*) malloc(256*sizeof(float));

Compile time error. Do you really think someone would fix that compile
time error by changing *JUST THE CAST*? 

foo = (float*)  malloc(256*sizeof(float));
foo = (double*) malloc(256*sizeof(float));

"Ohh, the bug is still there."  Yes it is, because you've sent a moron
to fix it, who doesn't look at the context of the code, and who thinks
type safety is just fixing casts and hoping for the best.

Do you really believe that's how to use the idiom for defensive
programming?  Nice strawman. The point is, the cast is working as a
static assertion, flagging the assumption made within size calculation.
The fix is not to change the assertion until you've changed the
calculation.

double * foo;
// elision
foo = malloc(256*sizeof(float));

Nasal demons.