[LCP]stdio.h reference

[ianezz at sodalia.it]

Il gatto di Priya, camminando sulla tastiera, ha scritto:
 > This is more of a conceptual question.
 > We know that multibyte data must be aligned on a
 > natural boundary.That is four byte dta on a four byte
 > boundary and two byte data on two byte boundary and so
 > forth.But what is the reason behind this.CAn anyone
 > please explain.What will be the problem if the data is
 > not aligned???

The explanation I always heard was that the hardware is designed so
you have to use aligned addresses anyway. 

So, in order to get/store a piece of data at a unaligned address, the
hardware has to perform some additional masking and shifting,
resulting in slower access times.

BTW, what I see here seems to confirm that:
http://www.memorymanagement.org/glossary/a.html#alignment

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Matteo Ianeselli      ianezz AT sodalia.it  (+39) 0461 316452
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