Structures are used to hold a whole lot of different pieces of data in a collection - by element name not number. Sometimes, you   ll only want to hold some elements of your structure in specific circumstances - a good example is where you have a whole lot of similar things you   re describing, but only a limited range of elements applied to each.

A very good example in real    system    programming is an X Windows event - each has a time stamp and a sequence number, and an event type, and each has a target window. But only some of them have X and Y co-ordinates, only some of them have keypresses and statuses, and so on. One possible way of holding such events would be a sparsely populated structure, but in practise this would be very wasteful of memory - so a union is used.
(written 2008-06-08 15:09:57)

 C209 - C and C based languages - Structures and Unions

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