What is PVOID data type?

Question

Can someone explain what PVOID is and how it is used in a function like:

BOOL DoSomething(PVOID pMemPhy)

Answer 1

This and other mnemonic like BOOL, LPCTSTR have it origin with Windows, which BTW was developed before the existence of a C standard, and to not depend in a particular compiler it used its own types.

You can check the Old New Thing blog for more stories about to the Windows development history, and its oddities which will remain with us (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing).