[petsc-dev] Arguments that are logically void**

[Jed Brown]

There are a few places in PETSc where arguments that are logically void**
are implemented as void*. This removes the need for the user to provide an
explicit cast, and is backward compatible. MPI adopted this convention
between version 1.0 and 1.1. For example,

int MPI_Attr_get(MPI_Comm comm, int keyval,void **attribute_val, int *flag )
          /* MPI-1.0 */

int MPI_Attr_get(MPI_Comm comm, int keyval,void *attribute_val, int *flag )
           /* MPI-1.1 and later */


Inside the implementation, the actual assignment would look something like

*(void**)attribute_val = comm->attr_table[keyval];


Should we adopt this uniformly? The benefit is that the user doesn't need to
*always* cast to (void**) every time they call the function.

The downside is that the function signature does not make it obvious that
the user should pass the address of their pointer. On the other hand, C
pass-by-value semantics guarantee that the function couldn't do anything
like what it says if you didn't pass in the address of your pointer.


Note that this change cannot be made for (void(**)(void)) function arguments
because function pointers are not castable to non-function pointers (as per
the C standard, though it works on many platforms).
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