Re: [vox] unions [was: ACM article: 'Study: IT Budgets Opening Upto Linux']

[Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmilMAPS@dcn.davis.ca.us>]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Gabriel Rosa wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 
> > btw, in all my years of coding C, i just used a union for the first time.
> > i feel like celebrating.  :)   also wrote my first lex program.   now the
> > big trick will be writing the bison companion.  oi vey.
> >
> 
> I can think of many uses for them, but none in projects that I want to
> undertake.  Conceptually, they are very cool, but as one of my cs profs said
> (loosely), "In 15 years of C, I've seen 1 person use a union for a good
> reason".

In 15 years, I have used them a couple of times "for a good reason".  
Most interesting one was in a menu datastructure in an embedded C program.  
Kept data requirements small and allowed "polymorphic" data handling.  In
other cases, I setup various implementation-specific data format
converters with them.

But yes, good uses are rare.

> Congrats! ;)

Seconded ... and we won't even ask if your reasons were pure. :)

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