Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!oliveb!sun!gorodish!guy From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Loopholes Message-ID: <11243@sun.uucp> Date: Sun, 11-Jan-87 18:11:28 EST Article-I.D.: sun.11243 Posted: Sun Jan 11 18:11:28 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 12-Jan-87 00:37:31 EST References: <2029@brl-adm.ARPA> <604@sdchema.sdchem.UUCP> <10849@sun.uucp> <1933@mmintl.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Lines: 16 Summary: But arguably C *does* need a LOOPHOLE operator! > This isn't surprising. Generally speaking, the stronger the type checking, > the more need there is for this kind of operator -- especially if you want > to do systems-type programming with it. In some cases there are things you can't do in C without such an operator. For example, if you have a "register" variable of some type, and you want to interpret its bits as a value of some other type, you can't use the *(something_else *)(&x) trick. The lack of such an operator in C might not be surprising; it is amusing, though, that there are grungy low-level non-portable things that can be expressed in a language with more strongly checked types than C's, but not in C.