[c++] Purpose of Unions in C and C++

As you say, this is strictly undefined behaviour, though it will "work" on many platforms. The real reason for using unions is to create variant records.

union A {
   int i;
   double d;
};

A a[10];    // records in "a" can be either ints or doubles 
a[0].i = 42;
a[1].d = 1.23;

Of course, you also need some sort of discriminator to say what the variant actually contains. And note that in C++ unions are not much use because they can only contain POD types - effectively those without constructors and destructors.

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