"This worked really well up to the point where I needed two kinds of lists. One that accepted floats and another one that works with arbitrary pointers." Had h

"This worked really well up to the point where I needed two kinds of lists. One that accepted floats and another one that works with arbitrary pointers." Had he never heard of unions? Even without knowledge of unions, you could treat a pointer as a, depending on the architecture, sequence of 32 bits. That sequence can be cast to whatever you want. So long as you have a clear way of describing what you've stored in that 32 bit sequence, you should never get confused.