On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote: > There's background in > <http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=36593>. Neither > Richi nor me could find the union-assignment "gcc extension" at > a glance, probably because it's not an *extension* but an > implementation-defined behavior, and actually duly documented as > such. However, to cross-reference that section together with
And also explicitly described in a footnote added in C99 TC3: 15. Page 073, 6.5.2.3 Attach a new footnote to the words "named member" in paragraph 3: *) If the member used to access the contents of a union object is not the same as the member last used to store a value in the object, the appropriate part of the object representation of the value is reinterpreted as an object representation in the new type as described in 6.2.6 (a process sometimes called "type punning"). This might be a trap representation. The doc patch is OK. (I think "is not allowed" is misleading when describing code that is compile-time valid but had undefined behavior if executed, but feel free to put "has undefined behavior" in place of "might not work" if you wish.) -- Joseph S. Myers [EMAIL PROTECTED]