[cfe-dev] Why the argument of `delete' is converted to void* ?

[Enea Zaffanella]

We have noticed that, in the AST produced by clang, the expression 
argument of a CXXDeleteExpr node is implicitly converted to void*:

# cat delete.cc
struct S {};

void free(S* ps) {
   delete ps;
}

# llvm/Debug+Asserts/bin/clang -cc1 -ast-dump delete.cc
[...]
void free(S *ps) (CompoundStmt 0x4822650 <delete.cc:3:18, line:5:1>
   (CXXDeleteExpr 0x4822628 <line:4:3, col:10> 'void'
     (ImplicitCastExpr 0x4821df8 <col:10> 'void *' <BitCast>
       (ImplicitCastExpr 0x4821de0 <col:10> 'struct S *' <LValueToRValue>
         (DeclRefExpr 0x4821db8 <col:10> 'struct S *' lvalue ParmVar 
0x47eeb20 'ps' 'struct S *')))))


What are the reasons for introducing such an implicit cast?

Enea.