structure problem - error or warning?

[Mark Weiser]

> Why does the C compiler only give a warning instead of an error on the
> use of an illegal structure member. 

That's no bug, that's a feature!  It is a kind of cheap union, 
in which you can pick apart anything as though it were a structure.
Now that C has real unions it is unnecessary, but there is a lot of
C out there that depends on this "bug".
-- 
Spoken: Mark Weiser 	ARPA:	mark at maryland
CSNet:	mark at umcp-cs 	UUCP:	{seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!mark
U.S.: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742