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From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: How (not) to Program in C (was Re: PD C as solution to binary groups)
Message-ID: <1668@sol.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 31-Dec-69 18:59:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: sol.1668
Posted: Wed Dec 31 18:59:59 1969
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Aug-87 05:49:23 EDT
References: <6960@g.ms.uky.edu> <3725@ncoast.UUCP> <2527@whuts.UUCP> <2639@hoptoad.uucp> <1101@laidbak.UUCP> <3367@zen.berkeley.edu> <4261@ncoast.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 13

|Unions -- are NEVER necessary.  The only legal use of a union is to shrink a
|variable which can contain a number of different types of values; a struct
|will work just as well, at a (possibly large) space penalty.  Illegal uses,
|such as:

I beg to differ. Unions are useful.  It is very useful in yacc to make
the type returned by action routines a union, in fact yacc does some
type checking for you if you have activated the %union feature.

But then yacc doesn't exist on all systems with C so it is a bad
example.

	Ken