I was responding to the author's general claim that "In the old days it was possible to access members of structs inside unions without having to name the inter

I was responding to the author's general claim that "In the old days it was possible to access members of structs inside unions without having to name the intermediate struct.". However, I stand corrected in two regards. The first is that as of gcc 4.6+, the sed example the author provided is no longer allowed even if the structs are unnamed. (I was testing with gcc 3.4.) I verified that gcc 3.4 would happily allow me to use the provided sed example as long as I removed the names from the structs. Second, the C11 standard specifically does not allow for the sed example provided because the structs in the unions contain duplicate members. I had seen reasoning that hinted at what you're saying in one of the comments posted on the author's blog entry. Regardless, thanks for encouraging me to dig deeper.