Is Python type safe?

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.49.1079471195.742.python-list at python.org>,
 Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

>     Skip> Python: yes.  I don't know about Java or C# but my guess is that
>     Skip> since C++ has casts you can make it do some type unsafe things.
> 
> Sorry to follow up to my own post, but unions also create type unsafety.
> Unlike Pascal's records (remember them?), C/C++ unions are not
> discriminated, so you can write values into the union using one slot and
> read using another:
> 
>     #include <stdio.h>
>     int main(int argc, char *argv[])
>     {
>         union {
>             float f;
>             int i;
>         } x;
> 
>         x.f = 3.14159;
>         fprintf(stderr, "%x\n", x.i);
>     }

Of course you can.  Given C's roots as a high level assembly language, 
why would you expect anything else?

I was once asked on an interview how I would tell, inside of a C 
program, if I was on a big endian or a small endian machine.  I said I'd 
create a union of a long and a char[4], set the long equal to 1, and see 
which char it showed up in.  The interviewer looked shocked, thought 
about it for a while, and finally said something like, "yeah, I guess 
that would work".

To this day, I have no idea what other plan he had in mind.