[cygx]

The only problem is how to deal with casting arrays of integers (or whatever) to arrays of bytes. But that's a problem for portable C software anyway.

Byte-wise access to objects is legal and completely portable between conforming implementations. What isn't portable are arbitrary type conversions through pointer casts as these violate the effective typing rules. Such casts may break in practice due to mis-alignment or because of aliasing behind the optimizers back.

In a way, C is a strongly typed language - the type system is just really unsound.

[sedachv]

> Byte-wise access to objects is legal and completely portable between conforming implementations.

That makes absolutely no sense. Just think about endianness for example. Type conversions in C are extremely tricky, and in many cases are not guaranteed to be portable across different compilers even on the same architecture. There is a good explanation of what you can and cannot count on in chapter 6 of Harbison and Steele's C A Reference Manual.

[cygx]

There's also a perfectly good list of what you can and cannot count on in the ISO C standard, no need for secondary literature.

While the values of the bytes are not specified, the ability to get at them is, and a conforming implementation needs to provide this ability.