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From: "Bob Spooner" <rls19@psu.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Reading Float Data from a binary file into ada
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 11:05:52 -0500
Organization: Penn State University, Center for Academic Computing
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Date: 2007-02-01T11:05:52-05:00
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"Steve" <nospam_steved94@comcast.net> wrote in message 
news:45GdnVwAocsGylzYnZ2dnUVZ_oannZ2d@comcast.com...
> [snip] Unchecked conversion is the preferred way of copying the memory 
> image from one value to another that is of a different type.  This is the 
> preferred way to handle what C was doing with a union.
>
Well, it's the common way to do it, but the C standard doesn't say that 
you'll get what you expect if you write the data one way and read it another 
way. Both K & R and the MISRA standard warn about this, but "everybody" 
seems to rely on it working. Unions were originally created to allow variant 
records, but I haven't encountered them being used that way in actual code 
in my admittedly limited experience.
Regards,
Bob