There's this stackoverflow qanswer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11373203/accessing-inacti...

where answers try to distill the standard into something legible by humans. Unsurprisingly, they come to different conclusions.

The overall interpretation in some situations, if you look at things just right, you can do type punning in C++. But it's pretty risky since you're a LOC away from the compiler deleting your function.

Or, you can't really do it at all safely. Which I would conclude from the above anyways.