On 2010-04-14 09:31, Paul E Condon wrote: [snip]
non-obvious --- to the point that there was an open contest with prizes awarded for the most obfuscated example of C code. The prizes went to the code for which the judges were most surprised on seeing it run after they read the code and tried to figure out what would happen when it was run.
http://www1.us.ioccc.org/main.html I guess they got bored looking at normal production C code...
There was also an Obfuscated Perl Contest, but that only ran for 5 years due to the "Perl" and "obfuscation" being redundant.
But the union construct is now there in the language in order to allow the professional practitioner to make his code slightly less
Unions have been in C for at least 20 years; probably since the Early Days.
-- Dissent is patriotic, remember?