Enforce strong type checking in C (type strictness for typedefs)

Question

Is there a way to enforce explicit cast for typedefs of the same type? I\'ve to deal with utf8 and sometimes I get confused with the indices for the character count and the

Answer 1

Use a lint. See Splint:Types and strong type check.

Strong type checking often reveals programming errors. Splint can check primitive C types more strictly and flexibly than typical compilers (4.1) and provides support a Boolean type (4.2). In addition, users can define abstract types that provide information hiding (0).

Answer 2

With C++11 you can use an enum class, e.g.

enum class char_idx_t : unsigned int {};
enum class byte_idx_t : unsigned int {};

The compiler will enforce an explicit cast between the two types; it is like a thin wrapper class. Unfortunately you won't have operator overloading, e.g. if you want to add two char_idx_t together you will have to cast them to unsigned int.

Answer 3

If you were writing C++, you could make two identically defined classes with different names that were wrappers around an unsigned int. I don't know of a trick to do what you want in C.