Void pointers and pointer arithmetic

Arne Lundberg arne at yc.estec.nl
Tue Jan 2 23:59:20 AEST 1990


I am trying to write some code that tries to access members in a structure
by knowing the start address and the offset to a particular member element.
The following program shows a small example (the real program does not 
hardcode the offsets etc.) Is this program legal in ANSI C, will it
produce the desired result? 

The (Non-ANSI) compilers I have tested either gives the value for `a'
three times or complains about ``unknown size for pointer to void''.
It works perfectly well if I change the type of p to be ``char *''.

---------------------------------------
struct x {
    int a, b, c;
} x = {
    1, 2, 3
};

main()
{
    void *p = &x;
    printf("a %d\n", *(int *)(p + 0));
    printf("b %d\n", *(int *)(p + 4));
    printf("c %d\n", *(int *)(p + 8));
}
---------------------------------------


BTW,
is it possible to write an ANSI compatible ``offsetof'' macro
for traditional C compilers? I am now using the XtOffset macro
from the X11/Toolkit but would like to have something that doesn't
require an additional name for the ``pointer to the structure'' type.

Arne Lundberg

European Space Technology Centre, Noordwijk, the Netherlands
arne at yc.estec.nl or ALUNDBER at ESTEC.BITNET
Phone: +31 1719 84865, Fax: +31 1719 12142, Telex: 39098



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