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Comment by _wmd | Hacker News Reader

Can we please get a quote on this one. If reinterpreting memory via a union is valid in C99, including data vs function pointers, then so would reinterpreting that memory via a cast, which would seem to violate one of the most elementary aspects of the standard (e.g. such a rule would be difficult or impossible to implement on a Harvard architecture machine, which the standard previously made plenty of allowance for)

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Page 83, section §6.5.2.3 of the C11 standard, footnote 95) says

> If the member used to read 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 C standard does not allow casting directly between function pointers and other pointers; they might not even be the same size. Using a union or memcpy will allow you to standards-compatibly reinterpret the bit pattern of a function pointer as a data pointer or vice versa (modulo size differences), but creating the resulting pointer, even without dereferencing it, might cause a crash if the bit pattern is a "trap representation", and in any case dereferencing it isn't guaranteed to do anything useful. ...Not that a portable program has any business trying to read instruction opcodes in the first place.

Apparently that is correct and I was wrong above (though not in C++) [1]. However, according to the standard, the actual value is unspecified, because float bit representation is undefined.

[1]: http://dbp-consulting.com/tutorials/StrictAliasing.html

Going through a union is the correct way of viewing one type as another. Casting pointers to accomplish this is undefined behaviour (except for char *) and compilers do TBBA (type-based alias analysis) based on the assumption you don't do it. Famously, the Linux kernel does this a lot and needs to be compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing.

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