This would be caughtable at compile time if the C programming language supported unions in a better way than it currently does. Ada, for example, has discrimin

This would be caughtable at compile time if the C programming language supported unions in a better way than it currently does. Ada, for example, has discriminants, which allows binding of a specific view of a byte buffer to a specific constant. There are also other solutions, for example making values to be types.