casting to/from union types

[brnstnd at stealth.acf.nyu.edu]

In article <235 at taumet.COM> steve at taumet.UUCP (Stephen Clamage) writes:
  [ on casting from a component type to the union type ]
> It seems unnecessary to invent an extension to C to accomodate what must
> be a very unusual operation.

There's at least one ``usual'' example of essentially the same problem,
namely in BSD Internet socket programming: struct in_addr has just a
single component, namely u_long s_addr. In the one case where I ever
used one value as both those types, I kept just the struct around, and
referred to its s_addr component when necessary. This always works.

---Dan