[Tinyos-devel] Safe TinyOS pointer annotations

[David Gay]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 11:09 AM, Octav Chipara <ochipara at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could the same thing be realized by defining special data types? I'm
>  thinking that all this could be handled in the same way we handle
>  network types. It could also make thinks look more like standard c and
>  solve the incompatibility problem between different versions of nesc.

Except if something is broken, the annotations should work in
typedefs. However, typedef's are rarely meaningful for the annotations
with arguments (@count(blah)), as blah typically needs to refer to
expressions only available at the point of use. E.g. in

  void f(int *@count(n) x, int n);

there's no useful typedef for 'int *@count(n)' ...

Note also one drawback about making the _or_null annotations too
verbose: within data structures, you need to use the _or_null
versions, because the initial state of pointers in data structures is
nearly always null.

David