Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!wasatch!utah-gr!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wsccs!terry
From: terry@wsccs.UUCP (Every system needs one)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Unions
Keywords: What can they be used for?
Message-ID: <759@wsccs.UUCP>
Date: 30 Oct 88 01:03:57 GMT
References: <322@hrc.UUCP> <6142@june.cs.washington.edu>
Lines: 24

In article <6142@june.cs.washington.edu>, pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel) writes:
> dan@hrc.UUCP (Dan Troxel VP) writes:
> >Except for the memory savings, what are Unions suited for?
> 
> Well, I guess that they indicate something about the usage of the
> fields in the union.  This is a programmer convenience rather than a
> runtime convenience.

Packets.  It is nice to have a model which resembles reality.  The type field
would, of course, not be included within the union.

Namelists.	You can use symbol table information in a debugger in a way
that was not intended in the compiler.  Sharing common data structures is
desirable thing when writing a debugger.

Different reading and writing models for devices.  This can be used to speed
up disk I/O immensely.


| Terry Lambert           UUCP: ...{ decvax, uunet } ...utah-cs!century!terry |
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