[PATCH] do proper typecasting on malloc() and calloc() calls

[Radoslaw Szkodzinski]

On Tuesday 21 March 2006 00:52, Eric Hopper wrote yet:
> But, stricter checking for void * was not added into C++ to encourage
> the use of static_cast. 

Well, I'm not a C++ historian.

> The rule was added before static_cast was 
> added.  It was also not added for reasons involving any sort of stupid
> zealotry other than a desire to avoid having a type system that was any
> more liberal than it absolutely had to be.

It's not really much more liberal, except it allows some things to work better 
in C (like NULL and malloc)

>
> In C++, you have the 'new' operator.  And it generates a pointer of the
> correct type.  The biggest reason for the 'void * will freely convert to
> anything' rule in C (which was added in C90) was to avoid just the sort
> of ugliness this patch perpetrates.  But it's also a form of ugliness
> that simply doesn't happen in properly written C++, so the rule is not
> needed there.
>

I do understand that one rarely mallocs anything in C++ or fudges with 
pointers. However, one rare and easy to handle special case against breaking 
proper C code just doesn't seem like a good trade-off for me.
C++ isn't compatible with C as it stands now. E.g. varargs and other C99 
features.

> In much the same way as it irritates me when people say that Mercurial
> was inspired by git,

Yes, the relation is superfluous only. Mercurial has a very different 
repository format and different assumptions.

> I think [the patch is] really of dubious worth, but the the C code 
> is also very tiny and rarely touched, so making it slightly uglier in
> order to make it easier to compile Mercurial somewhere might be worth
> it.

Submitting to ugliness is the first step to disaster.

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