Re: somebody dropped a (warning) bomb

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Feb 8 2007 08:33, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>And the thing is, sometimes -Wpointer-sign-compare is just horribly 
>broken. For example, you cannot write a "strlen()" that doesn't 
>complain about "unsigned char *" vs "char *". And that is just a BUG.
>
>I'm continually amazed at how totally clueless some gcc warnings are. 
>You'd think that the people writing them are competent. And then 
>sometimes they show just how totally incompetent they are, by making it 
>impossible to use "unsigned char" arrays together with standard 
>functions.

I generally have to agree with you about the unsigned char* vs char*. It 
is a problem of the C language that char can be signed and unsigned, and 
that people, as a result, have used it for storing 
"shorter_than_short_t"s.

What C needs is a distinction between char and int8_t, rendering "char" 
an unsigned at all times basically and making "unsigned char" and 
"signed char" illegal types in turn.


Jan
-- 
ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/
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