Dumb question on dyn. mem. alloc (if(hate(novices)) dont_read();)

[Kevin Szabo]

>> ...  It seems that no
>> matter how I declare the function calloc() or how I typecast in
>> the returned pointer, I get a warning from lint that I have
>> a "possible pointer alignment problem." 

What options are you passing to LINT? If you are on a BSD system, don't
use the -c option.  If you are on sys3/sys5 use the -c option.

Henry Spencer says:
>Ignore the messages...
>...the "lint" entry in the Makefile for any program
>of mine that uses malloc() a lot tends to read something like:
>	lint foo bar bletch | egrep -v 'possible pointer alignment'

Actually, you can get LINT to do a little bit more checking for you,
and thereby find a few of those irritating little bugs where you
allocate a structure of the wrong size while casting it to the correct
pointer type.  I find that LINT generally believes a cast to a pointer
type, as long as you don't/do use the -c option (on a BSD/SYSIII system).
The -c option tells lint to complain (or not complain) about all 
non-portable pointer mismatches and questionable pointer casting.

You can then automatically allocate a structure and cast it
using a nice little macro:

#define ALLOC( x )	((x *) malloc( sizeof(x)))

and a companion:

#define FREE( x )	free((char *) ( x ))

The ALLOC macro behaves like pascal's "new( x )" builtin, and reduces the
chances of a typographical error such as:
	ptr_type1 = (ptr_type1) malloc( sizeof (type2));
We started using the macros after we spent two days searching for exactly
this type of error.  Argh.

			Kevin
-- 
Kevin Szabo' watmath!wateng!ksbszabo (U of W VLSI Group, Waterloo, Ont, Canada)