Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!scs
From: scs@athena.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Overzealous alignment and padding
Message-ID: <7613@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 22 Oct 88 22:18:33 GMT
References: <410@sdrc.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: scs@adam.pika.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Lines: 15

In article <410@sdrc.UUCP> scjones@sdrc.UUCP (Larry Jones) writes:
>I am looking for information about C compilers that are overzealous
>about aligning structure members and padding structures...
>it makes it impossible to declare a struct that
>conforms to some external format (e.g. records in a file)

As was discussed recently in this newsgroup, you can avoid all
structure arrangement problems by simply not attempting to
conform to external binary formats, but by using an external text
file format instead.  (Efficiency hackers find this solution
unpalatable, but the parse time and file size issues are often
not real problems in practice.)

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs@adam.pika.mit.edu