[Boost-users] [endian] Endian types in union

Hello, This may be more appropriate for the devel list, but someone just pointed out on this list that an endian library has been submitted for approval. I've *just* needed classes like this (actually I wrote my own similar classes), and decided to see how the Boost library stacked up. It looks quite nice, and I'd be excited to see this included. One suggestion I would make is that the endian classes should not have constructors. As of version 0.5, trying to put them into a union causes a compiler error. Take the struct from the example, and add a union: struct header { big4_t file_code; big4_t file_length; little4_t version; little4_t shape_type; union { big4_t foo; little4_t bar; } baz; }; I get the following errors: endian_example.cpp:37: error: member 'boost::integer::big4_t <unnamed>::header::<anonymous union>::foo' with constructor not allowed in union endian_example.cpp:38: error: member 'boost::integer::little4_t <unnamed>::header::<anonymous union>::bar' with constructor not allowed in union By removing all constructors, the errors go away. I cam across this very issue when developing my classes, and found the answer in this comp.lang.c++.moderated post: <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/msg/ 103835a7b493723e?hl=en&> As an experiment, I modified boost/integer/endian.hpp to remove the constructors, and add an operator=() to see if this worked, and it did: template class endian< big, T, n_bytes, unaligned > : cover_operators< endian< big, T, n_bytes >, T > { public: typedef T value_type; operator T() const { return detail::load_big_endian(bytes); } void operator=(T i) { detail::store_big_endian (bytes, i); } private: char bytes[n_bytes]; }; I'd suggest making this change to all classes so that they can be used in unions. -Dave