From: utzoo!decvax!cca!gwyn@Brl@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: VAX System III PCC question
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2792
Posted: Thu Aug 19 21:41:56 1982
Received: Fri Aug 20 04:45:24 1982

From:     Doug Gwyn 
Date:     9 Aug 82 19:58:25-EDT (Mon)
My informants tell me that
struct	{
	short	svar;
	float	fvar;
	}
has a size of 8 bytes (padding before fvar to put it on a longword
boundary).  Why is this and what can be done about it?  (I thought
all VAX primitive data types could be arbitrarily byte-aligned.)
I understand PCC can be made to perform various alignments; perhaps
there is a simple fix to make the above struct 6 bytes in size?

This is an important issue, since PDP-11 to VAX-11 binary file
transfers are bollixed up due to this difference.  Help!