Re: casting X* to char*

I'll say it again since you haven't yet got the picture. Even with a
POD, that raw byte string will often include padding. Consider a complex
Pod with componants that don't fit nicely together. ie: 2 chars and a
double.

The use of operator overloading is a far more powerful, efficient,
reusable, portable, maintainable, extendeable and safe way to transfer
bits around. Its a win-win bargain and bug free - no pointers involved.
Technically, op<< and op>> are universal in that any type can be
streamed efficiently with all padding striped away - guaranteed. Any
interface that can accept a std::stream& will do to swallow or send. And
remember that the overloaded operator is not a member function, the POD
need not be a class.

Imagine a complex PODA which is a member of a PODB type. There is no
need to write a new function to stream both PODB and its PODA member +
other members. The operator you wrote for PODA will do just fine, you
only need worry about PODB's immediate needs since PODA already knows
how to stream itself (its an object, not just a bunch of bytes).

Again, if you need a container of POD elements and you require streaming
the entire container's contents, you already have an operator for the
elements. Regardless of whether the container is sequential or not and
irrelevent of the padding constraints.

Programming the bit transfer becomes much, much easier, bullet proof and
with a lot less code.