Re: somebody dropped a (warning) bomb

Jan Engelhardt
2007-02-08T18:43:53Z

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/