Unions were designed to save space, using the same memory to store two or more different types of data. They were not meant to be used to extract bytes, nibbles, or bits, nor to implicitly cast data.

I never noticed it before, but after doing some java programming and coming back to C/C++ I've noticed there isn't a 'byte' data type.Why is that? It seems wrong to use a 'char' to store data that ...