[petsc-dev] macro wrappers around functions to caste suck

[Barry Smith]

On Apr 7, 2013, at 5:02 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
> 
>>  Seems inconsistent to only handle the cast automatically for
>>  some. We should do it all or nothing. That is be C++ish and let the
>>  user always pass a subclass where the class is expected or be C ish
>>  and always require the cast.
> 
> Unfortunately, there is no way to allow implicit conversion for
> subclasses without implicitly converting everything.

   True, people could pass any crazy thing in there.  The only hope is that the runtime checking of PetscObjects would get any non-PetscObjects passed in.


>  The explicit cast
> is visually jarring enough to make it obvious at the call site that that
> argument must be a PetscObject.  I'm pretty indifferent about changing
> it.

   I am fine with leaving the code as is at this time.

    Presumably the cast for function pointers IS needed for certain C++ compilers and cannot (or should not?) be done manually by users so we would do the trick for those?


   Barry