Thread: type casting void *

In C, you can assign a void pointer to any other pointer type. In C++, you cannot.

This is why you can do this in C (as malloc() returns a void * in C89)

Code:

char *p = malloc(3);

but not in C++.

In both languages, you can assign any pointer to a void pointer without a cast.

It may be that the Visual C++ 6 compiler is pretty outdated and not very standards compliant. You should probably upgrade your compiler.

It's also possible that the code was saved as a .cpp file, so MSVC tried to compile it as C++. This would probably result in an error about assigning void pointers. If you tell MSVC that this is really a C program by using a .c extension for your filename, it might compile it as such.

Originally Posted by Elysia

It may be that the Visual C++ 6 compiler is pretty outdated and not very standards compliant. You should probably upgrade your compiler.

That would be correct for C++, but this is C, and as far as I'm aware, the C side of Visual Studio 6 is OK. [I'm pressuming it's Visual Studio 6, rather than cl version 6 that is meant here, as cl version 6 would indeed be VERY old - coming up for 15 years or so - I can't find a concrete date of release in 2 minutes of googling, but it was prior to version 7.0, which was prior to Visual C++ 1.0, which came out in 1992 - so my guess would be closer to 1988 or so].

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Mats