On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 08:07 +0200, Shane Shields wrote: > Gerard Beekmans wrote: > > > Gerard Beekmans wrote: > > > >> It's probably something elemental to seasoned programmers. Anybody > >> care to explain? :) > > > > > > Ah found it. Apparently it's for historical reasons. The in_addr > > structure used to be a union of various structures. Networking > > changed, the union became unneeded and in_addr is left as a structure > > with just that single in_addr_t member. > > > > What's a union? :) > > > A union is basically the same as a structure. Same syntax, same method > of calling. I suppose you could call a union a subset of a structure. A > structure is more expandable/scalable though.
in an union all elements share the same memory, so that the size of an union is (at least) that of the biggest member. the size of a structure is (at least) that of all members of that structure. -- H CUH Rainer Peter Feller H -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
