It’s a historical artifact being presented in its original form. There’s no reason this code can’t be updated with a more modern bitwise int-float conversion. D

It’s a historical artifact being presented in its original form. There’s no reason this code can’t be updated with a more modern bitwise int-float conversion. Do that if you want to use it. Whether it is bad practice or not, people used to do this all the time, and so the compilers all tend to support type conversion via pointer and type punning via union. A lot of critical code in the real world would break if it suddenly didn’t work. C++ bit-cast is brand new (C++20) and until now the suggestion in C++ was to use memcpy, and hope and pray it gets elided. That might be correct but boy is it ugly and gross.