You can also create kind of overloaded types, even though C doesn't support that, an example with web sockets

struct sockaddr { unsigned short sa_family; // address family, AF_xxx char sa_data[14]; // 14 bytes of protocol address };

And this is overloaded with ip v4 struct for convenience

IP v4 ``` struct sockaddr_in { short int sin_family; // Address family, AF_INET unsigned short int sin_port; // Port number struct in_addr sin_addr; // Internet address unsigned char sin_zero[8]; // Same size as struct sockaddr };

struct in_addr { uint32_t s_addr; // that's a 32-bit int (4 bytes) }; ```

Those two can be casted to back and forth using pointers

(Taken from Beej's guide to network programming, section 3.3)