Why are void[] contents marked as having pointers?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 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.

I understand. You are sending around object representation. void[] may 
contain pointers, so you're simply not looking at the right abstraction.

>> 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.

Walter has written a class called OutBuffer (see std.outbuffer) the 
likes of which could be used to encapsulate representation marshaling.

Andrei