While that is right, what you could do with EQUIVALENCE was pretty much equivalent with what you can do with "union" in C. For some things FORTRAN was more verb

While that is right, what you could do with EQUIVALENCE was pretty much equivalent with what you can do with "union" in C. For some things FORTRAN was more verbose, for other things C is more verbose. Accessing a value was more laconic in FORTRAN, because you omitted the union name and the "." that are required in C. The fact that a union is considered a type in C allows the use of a typedef, which removes the need to repeat the definitions for multiple variables, but that is about the only help that you get in C. Both in C and in FORTRAN you must know the current type of the stored value and there is no protection against using the wrong type. If the current type cannot be determined statically, you must manage manually another variable storing a type tag, in both languages.