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From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: A curiosity...
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Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:57:24 -0500
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Date: 2008-12-04T17:57:24-05:00
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Randy Brukardt wrote:
> Every C-language interface that I've every used is
 > full of hacks to get around strong typing.
 > ...
 > Perhaps C programmers are so used to cruft that they
 > fail to abstract it away properly, but that reflects
 > more on the programmers (and the culture that they
 > work it) than the language.

I don't think that's particularly fair, or right.
The main issue that the sample exposes is that when
you have a library which needs to accept user objects
and pass them back into user code, it's going to be
difficult to define the interface properly without a
lot of mechanism.

It really is the case that all pthread_create wants
to do with that pointer is hand it back once it starts
the thread. I expect that in modern C++, this would
get wrapped in template code to make sure that the
type of the pointer passed matches the argument type
of the thread function, and I guess Ada would use
generics similarly, but in a C interface, you just do
the cast and leave it at that.