On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, David Abrahams wrote:
Very perceptive. There are almost no ways to use reinterpret_cast portably. If you want to get a char* that traverses the bytes of a long, you do it as below: ...
I think the correct change to silence the type conversion error is
char * first = static_cast<char *>(static_cast<void *>( const_cast<long*>(& l))); ... Hah, I think it's stylistically distasteful, but at least it's correct. I wish that it were properly spelled reinterpret_cast<char*>(&l) ;-)
Finally; I'd been looking for the "portable" solution -- and stuck with reinterpret_cast. Maybe Boost could define a standard char_cast or Do What I Mean dwim_cast? Something like template <class T> inline char * char_cast(T *x) { return static_cast<char *>(static_cast<void *>(x)); } template <class T> inline T * char_uncast(char *x) { return static_cast<T *>(static_cast<void *>(x)); } - Daniel