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From: Bob Larson 
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: alignment of struxures
Message-ID: <6970@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 4-Jan-85 03:04:46 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.6970
Posted: Fri Jan  4 03:04:46 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Jan-85 03:02:07 EST
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 12


Not at all portable.  Many machines KNOW (and need to know) that all
pointers to long (for example) are always aligned on a long word boundary.
Since the same machines force alignment of structures, structure assignment
won't work either.  The only type of copy that will work is the appropriate
number of char assignments.  (Of course a loop, macro, or function can be
used.) (To bad C doesn't have array assignments.)  (This assumes that
everything is an integral number of bytes... True on most machines.  (I
think pcc for tops-20 uses 36 bit characters... yuck.))

Bob Larson 
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