Why are void[] contents marked as having pointers?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Sun, 31 May 2009 23:24:09 +0300, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> But I think this is too much ado about nothing - you're avoiding the type system to start with, so use ubyte, insert a cast, and call it a day. 

I don't get it - not using casts is avoiding the type system? :P Note that I am NOT up-casting the void[] later back to some other type - it goes out to the network, a file, etc. void[] sounds like it fits perfectly in the type hierarchy for "just a bunch of bytes", except for the "may contain pointers" fine print.

> If you have too many casts, the problem is most likely elsewhere so that argument I'm not buying.

I could cut down on the number of casts if I were to replace most array appending operations to calls to a function that takes a void[] and then internally casts to an ubyte[] and appends that somewhere. There's a lot of diversity of types being worked with in my case - strings, various structs, more raw data, etc. I'm more annoyed that I'd need to do something like that to work around a design decision that may not have been fully thought out.

-- 
Best regards,
 Vladimir                          mailto:thecybershadow at gmail.com