From: Dmitry Antipov > Sent: 28 June 2023 11:45 > > On 6/28/23 11:24, David Laight wrote: > > > What are the (u16) casts for? > > Well, this is a kind of a C language purism intended to silence > warning: conversion from ‘int’ to ‘u16’ {aka ‘short unsigned int’} may change value [-Wconversion] > observed with W=123. The problem is that the casts can hide more than just a value being truncated. In this case the compiler even knows the values don't overflow. FWIW I've seen generated code for: *cp++ = (unsigned char)(value & 0xff); that masked the value with 0xff once for the & a second time for the cast and then stored the low byte. I don't think modern gcc will do that, but a dumb compiler will. If -Wconversion bleats about these sort of assignments it just needs permanently disabling (or deleting from the compiler!). David - Registered Address Lakeside, Bramley Road, Mount Farm, Milton Keynes, MK1 1PT, UK Registration No: 1397386 (Wales)