shannon@sun.uucp (Bill Shannon) (09/04/84)
dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP says: Thus you can use the "feature" of passing the address of a double where the address of its float portion is needed without having to add an offset. It should be made clear that this is EXTREMELY non-portable. It depends on something which is not true on e.g. the Sun using IEEE floating point format: The bit representation of a float is the same as the bit representation of a double except that it has fewer bits in the mantissa, and that the address of a double will point to a float with the "same" value. On many machines, such as the Sun, this is NOT TRUE. We have been bitten quite a few times by code that passes the address of a float to a routine expecting a pointer to a double. Bill Shannon Sun Microsystems, Inc.