Incompatible Return Type Question

Hi there!

Sorry for the rather simple question, I rarely ever code in plain C.

But essentially, I have something that looks like this:

Code:

---

// This is malloc'd and initialized somewhere, I promise!
static char **somestrings = NULL;


const char **getsomestrings(void)
{
    return somestrings;
}

---

The compiler throws a warning at me "returning ‘char **’ from a function with incompatible return type ‘const char **’"

Is it safe to just cast this like so:

Code:

---

return ( const char** )somestrings;

---

Or is there a legitimate reason the return type is considered "incompatible"?

In this case it is safe because you're going from something that can be modified to a const context. It is the vice versa situation that can be unsafe, e.g., because it could lead to an attempt to modify a string constant.