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From: gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: c types problem
Message-ID: <1261@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 6-Jan-86 05:45:49 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.1261
Posted: Mon Jan  6 05:45:49 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 7-Jan-86 06:33:17 EST
References: <870@kuling.UUCP>
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 13

> I need to define a type for a program which can store any of the types
> long, int, short and also the unsigned variants of them.
> Some of the routines referencing this types will not use them directly
> however, it will use the sys/types.h typedefs dev_t, time_t etc.
> It will look something like this: "(*func)(&data)" there *func,
> but not the calling routine knows what type is currently stored in "data".
> The formal (but ugly) way to solve this would proparbly be to use a union
> for all (about 10) types. But now I wonder if anyone have a simpler but
> resonably portable solution?

Since you're going to pass pointers, just coerce the actual data
address into a generic pointer ((void *) if you have it, otherwise
(char *)) and coerce it back inside the called function.