std.file.read returns void[] why?

[sclytrack via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Thursday, 17 April 2014 at 14:05:50 UTC, Regan Heath wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 13:59:20 +0100, Steven Schveighoffer 
> <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> It was never possible. You must explicitly cast to void[].
>
> to -> from?
>
>> void[] makes actually little sense as the result of whole-file 
>> read that allocates. byte[] is at least usable and more 
>> accurate. In fact, it's a little dangerous to use void[], 
>> since you could assign pointer-containing values to the void[] 
>> and it should be marked as NOSCAN (no pointers inside file 
>> data).
>
> I see what you're saying, byte[] is what *is* allocated.. but 
> my point is that it's not what those bytes actually represent.
>
> Are you saying void[] *is* currently marked NOSCAN?
>
>> However, when using the more conventional read(void[]) makes a 
>> LOT of sense, since any T[] implicitly casts to void[].
>
> Indeed. :)
>
> R

auto a1 = new ubyte[10];  //NO_SCAN set
auto a2 = new ubyte*[10]; // NO_SCAN not set
auto a3 = new void[10];   //NO_SCAN not set
auto a4 = new void *[10];  //NO_SCAN not set

void [] retains = a1;    //NO_SCAN REMAINS SET from the ubyte [] 
at creation time.

Since read comes straight from the file. It contains no memory 
pointers
and the NO_SCAN can be set.