Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!mcvax!kernel!mjh@uunet.uu.NET
From: mcvax!kernel!mjh@uunet.uu.NET (Mark J. Hewitt)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: casting to float without converting to float?
Message-ID: <11223@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 12 Jan 88 07:30:08 GMT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 25

Mark,
	Methinks  you are looking for   an equivalent to Mesa's  untyped
LOOPHOLE conversion.  I don't believe there is one in `C', no matter how
you bend the  rules, and I've been  `C' programming for many years  now.
Originally  Modula-2  only  had casts   (called type  transfer functions
there)  of the `C'  type, but the BSI/ISO  standarisation group has been
looking at `unsafe' conversions where only the bits  are transferred.  I
can't see how  this can be vendor independent  as the representations of
REAL types (both bit length and mantissa & exponent representations) are
still (despite IEEE) quite variable.

	Sorry to be so negative, but hope to be proved wrong.

Mark J. Hewitt

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