mat@hou5d.UUCP (04/09/84)
Are unions outside of structs a crock? Well, there is one important situation where they are used. The system II and system V YACC parsers allow arbitrary objects to be passed on the value stack; consistancy is insured by declarations of types represented by terminals and by a rather weird syntax. This is only feasible with unions and the unions (unlike variant records) need no discriminant, so there is no surrounding struct. Why, oh why saddle a useful construct like the union with a problem-dependent restriction like discriminants? Why go out of your way to make something simple into something troublesome by adding combersome restrictions that are not universally necessary? -- from Mole End Mark Terribile (scrape..dig) hou5d!mat ,.. .,, ,,, ..,***_*.