UNION and MAP
Unions are an old vendor extension which were commonly used with the
non-standard STRUCTURE and RECORD extensions. Use of UNION and
MAP is automatically enabled with -fdec-structure.
A UNION declaration occurs within a structure; within the definition of
each union is a number of MAP blocks. Each MAP shares storage
with its sibling maps (in the same union), and the size of the union is the
size of the largest map within it, just as with unions in C. The major
difference is that component references do not indicate which union or map the
component is in (the compiler gets to figure that out).
Here is a small example:
structure /myunion/
union
map
character(2) w0, w1, w2
end map
map
character(6) long
end map
end union
end structure
record /myunion/ rec
! After this assignment...
rec.long = 'hello!'
! The following is true:
! rec.w0 === 'he'
! rec.w1 === 'll'
! rec.w2 === 'o!'
The two maps share memory, and the size of the union is ultimately six bytes:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Byte offset
-------------------------------
| | | | | | |
-------------------------------
^ W0 ^ W1 ^ W2 ^
\-------/ \-------/ \-------/
^ LONG ^
\---------------------------/
Following is an example mirroring the layout of an Intel x86_64 register:
structure /reg/
union ! U0 ! rax
map
character(16) rx
end map
map
character(8) rh ! rah
union ! U1
map
character(8) rl ! ral
end map
map
character(8) ex ! eax
end map
map
character(4) eh ! eah
union ! U2
map
character(4) el ! eal
end map
map
character(4) x ! ax
end map
map
character(2) h ! ah
character(2) l ! al
end map
end union
end map
end union
end map
end union
end structure
record /reg/ a
! After this assignment...
a.rx = 'AAAAAAAA.BBB.C.D'
! The following is true:
a.rx === 'AAAAAAAA.BBB.C.D'
a.rh === 'AAAAAAAA'
a.rl === '.BBB.C.D'
a.ex === '.BBB.C.D'
a.eh === '.BBB'
a.el === '.C.D'
a.x === '.C.D'
a.h === '.C'
a.l === '.D'