Re: type based aliasing again

[Jamie Lokier <jamie dot lokier at cern dot ch>]

Rask Ingemann Lambertsen wrote:
>    The recommendation in the GCC manual, if that is anything to go by, is
> not to "cast to union" but to use a union. I.e. something like
> 
>     union foo { double a; int b[2]; };
>     foo.a = 2.0;
>     foo.b[1] = 0;
> 
>    This is documented to work, actually works, is shorter, is not
> write-only, etc.

The problem is that you have to change all the code which uses a `foo',
when you decide you want a particular piece of code to access it as an
`int'.  That means changing all the type declarations (previously might
have been `double'), and every place where the type is accessed.

That is often unworkable.

With some variation on anonymous unions, it might be workable.
Is that worth pursuing?

-- Jamie