Portable use of unions

[c9h at psuecl.bitnet]

In article <203 at sixhub.UUCP>, davidsen at sixhub.UUCP (Wm E. Davidsen Jr) writes:
>
>   The next to last line (2nd assignment) is flagged with a message of
> "conflicting use of union fields in a single statement." I tried it on
> seven common compilers and they all liked it. The int value of the union
> holds the subscript of the start of the string, while the pointer value
> will hold the actual starting address. Obviously only one can be valid
> at any given time.

This appears to be a poor attempt by the compiler to insure that the [assumed
stupid] programmer doesn't use both at the same time.  Unfortunately, this
only causes problems when you actually have a valid use for it.

>   I'm willing to be shown that there's a problem here, but only if
> either K&R or ANSI says there is. I don't care if people have broken
> compilers, that's their problem, right?

Yeah.  <*heavy* sigh>  I concur.  It's their problem.

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