Downward compatible extension to unions

[Karl Heuer]

In article <592 at dino.cs.iastate.edu> hascall at cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall) writes:
>The more I think about the ANSI standard for union initialization, the
>more I fail to understand it.  Was the following suggested...

The problem is that you're thinking in terms of a feature that allows you to
initialize unions.  All that X3J11 really wanted was a way to unambiguously
specify what is the initial value of a static-storage-duration union that is
*not* explicitly initialized.  It happens that their decision also provides a
half-assed way to explicitly initialize *some* unions, but that's pretty much
an unintended side effect.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl at ima.ima.isc.com or harvard!ima!karl), The Walking Lint