> Wheras, the direct equivalent in C, an assignment with a (type changing) cast, is illegal. I don't understand what you mean by that. The direct equivalent of

> Wheras, the direct equivalent in C, an assignment with a (type changing) cast, is illegal. I don't understand what you mean by that. The direct equivalent of what? Endianess is not part of the type system in C so I'm not sure I follow. > I think there should really be a dialect of C(++) where the machine model is exactly the physical machine. Linus agrees with you here, and I disagree with both of you. Some UBs could certainly be relaxed, but as a rule I want my code to be portable and for the compiler to have enough leeway to correctly optimize my code for different targets without having to tweak my code. I want strict aliasing and I want the compiler to delete extraneous NULL pointer checks. Strict overflow I'm willing to concede, at the very least the standard should mandate wrap-on-overflow ever for signed integers IMO.