Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!elroy!cit-vax!tybalt.caltech.edu!yair
From: yair@tybalt.caltech.edu (Yair Zadik)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C union problems (or is a pointer a pointer?)
Message-ID: <10537@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 29 Apr 89 09:36:52 GMT
References: <15058@sequent.UUCP> <1989Apr26.215903.10906@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
Reply-To: yair@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (Yair Zadik)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 25

I like the C++ solution the best: you can declare a union without a name
as long as it is within a struct.  These 'anonymous' unions behave they 
way you would expect them to.  You could just declare:

	typedef struct {
			int a;
			char b;
			union {
				int *c1;
				char *c2;
			      }
			} randomtype;

	randomtype random;

Then you could refer to random.a, random.b, random.c1, and random.c2 just
like in a Pascal record variant.  The only problem is that you need a C++
compiler to handle it.

yair@tybalt.caltech.edu