[scns]

In descendants of ML (Haskell, OCaml, Rust etc) you can use Algebraic Data Types to condense your wall of methods to one function

[nyanpasu64]

Algebraic data types have runtime case information, and won't let you reinterpret the underlying bits of a binary buffer between types. I think grandparent meant they wanted pointer casts, unions, reinterpret_cast, or transmute.