hiding lint's ravings (was Re: FAQ - malloc array - clarify)

[Doug McDonald]

In article <8086 at helios.TAMU.EDU> jdm5548 at diamond.tamu.edu (James Darrell McCauley) writes:
>How do you professionals deal with insignificant(?) ravings from
>lint (or other high quality C program verifiers) such as the 
>following:
>
>>test.c(x): warning: possible pointer alignment problem
>which was caused by the malloc in:
>
>>double **dmatrix(nr,nc)
>>int nr,nc;
>>{
>>  double **m = NULL;
>>
>>  m = (double **) malloc( (unsigned) nr * sizeof(double *) );
>>  if (!m) ...
>
>From what netlanders tell me, this warning is explanined as:
>(by Conor P. Cahill) 
>|>                         The problem is that malloc is defined
>|> as returning a pointer to char which has looser alignment requirements than
>|> pointer to pointer.  Since malloc guarrantees that the result is suitably 
>|> alligned for all data types, you can ignore this message.
>
>Well, I can just ignore warnings like this, but those who review
>my code (professors, employers, clients) are not likely to. It makes
>an bad impression and frankly, I find it a little embarrassing.


It is NOT embarrassing to you. It just plain a BUG in lint. Pure and
simple. Complain to the person that sold you the broken "lint".
A checker program really OUGHT to understand the rules of what it is
checking. One of those rules concersn alignments of the return
value of malloc.

Doug McDonald