Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!cam-cl!am
From: am@cl.cam.ac.uk (Alan Mycroft)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Union type conversions
Message-ID: <231@gannet.cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date: 23 Jun 88 15:05:22 GMT
References: <5754@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <1988Jun16.182158.2424@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@cl.cam.ac.uk
Reply-To: am@cl.cam.ac.uk (Alan Mycroft)
Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK
Lines: 9

In article <1988Jun16.182158.2424@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> So what it boils down to, is whether casting into a union type is
>> legal and portable...
>
>No.  You have to use the temporary union variable and assign to one of
>its members, as in your second example.

Yes, but have you ever seen a compiler which deals with this efficiently?
(Not to mention the human overhead.)