Union type conversions

[Alan Mycroft]

In article <1988Jun16.182158.2424 at utzoo.uucp> henry at 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.)