Re: locating an array

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:05:46 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<871ed226-f448-47c3-9faa-e4e8a04a7698@v42g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
On Feb 17, 5:26 pm, r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote:

James Kanze <james.ka...@gmail.com> writes:

I have a structure composedx of floats and strings. I want a
dummy array that is the same length starting at the same
address. I do this so I cann access the individual bytes of
the structure.

#include <iostream>
#include <ostream>
struct s { float a, b, c; };
struct t { char a[ sizeof( s )]; };
int main()
{ s s0;
  t * t0( reinterpret_cast< t* >( &s0 ));
  ::std::cout << sizeof( t0->a ); }

This seems more complicated than necessary, as well as
unnecissarily introducing undefined behavior.


  Where does it introduce undefined behavior?


When you access t0. T0 doesn't have a character type, so any
access of s through it is undefined behavior. (I think that
there are certain cases with g++ where this actually doesn't
work. But it's actually an interesting question---t->[i] is a
character type, and while I think that taken literally, the
standard says this is undefined behavior, I have a hard time
imagining an implementation where it wouldn't work, but
accessing the results of a reinterpret_cast< char* >( &s0)
would.)

If the goal is just to look at the individual bytes in an
object:


  The OP wanted to have an =BBarray that is the
  same length starting at the same address=AB.


Why? What does he really mean by array? For better or for
worse (mostly worse), getting an "unsigned char*" to the first
byte and knowing the size of the type (sizeof) comes down to
pretty much the same thing.

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