"No, that isn't my complaint at all because, note that I still want a diagnostic if we remove the cast." Okay, then you want something super strange and in-bet

"No, that isn't my complaint at all because, note that I still want a diagnostic if we remove the cast." Okay, then you want something super strange and in-between :) "I just want the access to be defined to members that happen to be of the same type and at the same offsets in these structures, without going all the way to assert that they are compatible types for the purposes of assignment/passing and pointer conversions. " Okay ... "The access should be defined even if the offset is the same in different ways, on those platforms where it happens to work out: " This qualifies in my book as super-strange. I'm pretty sure you will find no one who views the standard this way, as it contradicts the explicit wording pretty directly :P. So if you want that, you'd probably need a new language. Note also that it makes actual pointer analysis (IE andersens, etc) impossible without complete and total target info. You could never have a target independent thing do pointer analysis in this world.