Re: Inheritance and offsetof

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:03:03 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<c38f692e-57c9-4f62-8d3b-60bb14546040@z28g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
On Sep 22, 3:10 pm, Marcel M=FCller <news.5.ma...@spamgourmet.com>
wrote:

Francesco S. Carta wrote:

If you already have an instance of your type, you are
right, but otherwise you have to make your own
pseudo-instance. And that is exactly the way the macros
offsetof and my structoffsetof work with all that casts.

Furthermore when dealing with an instance I would prefer to
cast to char*: (char*)&b.m3 - (char*)&(A&)b


Thanks for your explanation, now it's clearer.


I just saw a bug in the example, which may have caused confusion.
It should have been:
   void foo(A*);
   int main()
   { B b;
     b.m1 = offsetof(B, m3) - structoffsetof(B, A);
     foo(&b);
     return 0;
   }

I still think you could avoid those macros, also you could
avoid C- style casts.


I think there is no way of implementing things like offsetof
without a C-style cast.


The most obvious way of implementing offsetof is something like:
    #define offsetof( type, elem ) __builtin_offsetof( type, elem )
No casts, C-style or otherwise.

I'm just saying this because I've been told several times to
never use C-style casts,


This works unless you have to deal with void* or something
like offsetof.


No. The only thing a C-style cast can do that static_cast or
reinterpret_cast (combined with const_cast) can't is cast to a
private base class.

--
James Kanze

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