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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: making it easier to use unions
Message-ID: <6918@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Jul-86 13:43:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6918
Posted: Thu Jul 10 13:43:53 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Jul-86 13:43:53 EDT
References: <1725@brl-smoke.ARPA>, <19600002@uicsrd>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 12

> C++ permits "anonymous unions" ...

Actually, the really old C compilers permitted this too, by accident,
since they had no notion that a struct/union member name "belonged" to
a particular struct/union.  To them, a member name was just an offset
and a type.  Since all offsets in a union are 0, it all worked out.
A certain amount of old code, notably the Unix kernel, relied on this.
This trick broke when member names became local.
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