Opinions on type-punning in C++?

Question

I\'m curious about conventions for type-punning pointers/arrays in C++. Here\'s the use case I have at the moment:

Compute a simple 32-bit checksum over a

Answer 1

I know this thread has been inactive for a while, but thought I'd post a simple generic casting routine for this kind of thing:

// safely cast between types without breaking strict aliasing rules
template
ReturnType Cast( OriginalType Variable )
{
    union
    {
        OriginalType    In;
        ReturnType      Out;
    };

    In = Variable;
    return Out;
}

// example usage
int i = 0x3f800000;
float f = Cast( i );

Hope it helps someone!