Re: An alias bug

["David S. Miller" <davem at dm dot cobaltmicro dot com>]

   Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 23:43:07 -0600
   From: Jeffrey A Law <law@cygnus.com>

   "u" is a "long long", I don't think casting it to "long_long_type"
   is valid C or C++.

I see this come up now and again, so I'm finally going to ask.
How do we tell users they can take one type, and look at "pieces" of
it, when they use gcc?  Or are you saying that we declare "long long"
as a special case in this regard?

There is a lot of legacy code out there which does this.  One example
is the "portable" generic IP networking checksum function provided in
the BSD networking sources.

If we now say "such code is bogus", we better have a game plan as to
what we tell these people who have similar code which have worked for
many years yet now barfs just like hj's test case.

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com