[OPEN-ILS-DEV] PATCH: transport_client.c (pedantic)

[Scott McKellar]

This patch is mostly pedantic.

1, I explicitly initialized two pointers to NULL.  The current code
does not initialize them at all, except that safe_malloc() fills them
with binary zeros -- which is equivalent to NULL on most systems but
not all.

2. I eliminated the casts on the return values from safe_malloc().
Such casts clutter up the code to no purpose, and introduce a small
but needless risk.

The casts are not necessary because a void pointer may safely be
converted, without a cast, to a pointer to any datatype.  There 
may be alignment issues (though not in this case), but a cast does
not solve that problem anyway.

The casts are risky because, if a prototype or declaration for
safe_malloc() is not in scope, the compiler will assume that this
function returns an int rather than a void *.  If there is no cast,
the compiler will notice the type mismatch in the assignment and
issue a diagnostic, thereby alerting you that you left out an
#include.  However if you include the cast, the compiler will
silently perform a conversion that may not work on some 
architectures.

Scott McKellar
http://home.swbell.net/mck9/aargh/

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