Cheers to the CMU team for making a great development tool!

I am starting this thread so that others like myself might provide some suggestions to the CMU developers as they improve the RobotC language.

Are there any plans to add the C language union to the RobotC language?

-Thanks
Olorin

PS
For those not familiar with the C programming language:
A union allows the same memory space to be interpreted in different ways. For example: a message consisting of four bytes could be interpreted as an array 4 characters, 2 shorts, or 1 long. What good is this? Suppose you want to read two registers in a sensor that store your sensor data as two contiguous bytes...

// The following code will not compile (yet?) in RobotC
#define NUM_BYTES_STATE_MSG 2
typedef struct
{
short sensorState;
}SensorStateDataType;
typedef struct
{
byte msg[NUM_BYTES_STATE_MSG];
}SensorStateMsgType;
// Both of the above structures are the same size, but interpreted differently
typedef union
{
SensorStateDataType data;
SensorStateMsgType dataMsg;
}SensorStateType;

int main(void)
{
string aMsg = "";
eraseDisplay();

SensorStateType sensorState;

sensorState.data.sensorState = 0;

/***Tell your sensor hardware you want some data here***/

// Get reply from hardware with data in message
readI2CReply(S1, sensorState.dataMsg.msg[0], NUM_BYTES_STATE_MSG);

// Display data
// (The union allows the above msg to be reinterpreted as short data without
// any extra processing)
StringFormat(aMsg, "heading: %d", sensorState.data.sensorState);
nxtDisplayTextLine(1, aMsg);

wait1Msec(10000);

StopAllTasks();
}

I think you'll find the "union" keyword is now supported (release 1.17+) It can be used within a structure definition but is not presently available at the top level of a structure definition.

Mr Swan,
Thank you for responding to this post. I thought a union would be useful since some device registers store data larger than a byte, and conveniently ordered MSB LSB. Would you please explain by way of example what you mean by "used within a structure definition"? Would you mind reinterpreting from the above:


Thank you for your continued support,
Olorin

In earlier versions of ROBOTC you needed to have "union" nested within a struct as follows

The compiler was not accepting "typedef union". As of version 1.17, this has been fixed.