summary of C-standards workshop at Usenix

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

(void *) is needed in order to have a type for things like malloc(3C).
(char *) should be reserved for real pointer to char, so type-checking
can be done on (char *).  The (void *) syntax is unambiguous.

Although Brian Kernighan helped write the C book, the language was
designed by Dennis Ritchie.  Some of the more modern improvements
seem to have arisen from discussions with others, notably Steve
Johnson.  One indication of how Dennis Ritchie feels about the ANSI
standardization effort is that he specially urged Larry Rossler to
come to the USENIX conference to describe the effort and sat on
stage during the presentation.

Few people who have been writing production code on a variety of
systems will dispute the utility of good language standards.