On 27 November 2013 21:18, erik quanstrom <quanstro@labs.coraid.com> wrote:

> the union itself explicitly declares aliasing, not which
> member you use.
>

actually, even a union won't help you here:
"When a value is stored in a member of an object of union type, the bytes
of the object
representation that do not correspond to that member but do correspond to
other members
take unspecified values."

Really, the way to do this particular operation portably is to write it
portably, and extract and rearrange the bytes.