Re: type-punning?

Andrey Tarasevich <andreytarasevich@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
> You perform memory reinterpretation in your code. You have an lvalue 
> 'dat' of type 'char*', which is reinterpreted as an lvalue of type 
> 'void*' by using a conversion followed by a dereference '*(void**) 
> &dat'. In general, accessing the lvalue obtained by such 
> reinterpretation causes undefined behavior in C, unless the types are 
> "similar enough".

In particular, (char *) and (void *) are required to have the same
representation and alignment requirements, so reinterpretation is almost
(but not quite) guaranteed to work in that case.  The same is not true
of other pointer types, however, and reinterpretation involving other
pointer types *does* fail on some implementations.

-- Larry Jones

Apparently I was misinformed. -- Calvin