On May 19, 2010, at 1:21 PM, Gerasimos Dimitriadis wrote:
> I think that in this case there is no need for a conversion macro, since
> we are not dealing with arrays but with pointers to value_string_ext.
> By the way, are the VALS/TFS/RVALS casts necessary for certain
> compilers? Because I thought that arrays automatically decay to pointers
> when needed
Yes, that's what the ANSI/ISO C standard says.
I'm not sure why those macros exist. I have the impression that at least one purpose of the macro might be to do type checking. The "structure to help you interpret the data in a more human-readable fashion" pointer is a void *, so there's no type checking; if you say VALS(something that's not a value_string array or pointer), the compiler will warn you. "Make a const value_string[] look like a _value_string pointer" shouldn't be ncessary, as, in most contexts, a reference in C to an array of X is converted to a value of type "pointer to X", and "value_string" is a typedef for "struct _value_string".
