[Tutor] what is 'doubleword alignment'?

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

Got it already, I think. The word boundary of one chunk of information (in my case 8 bytes) is aligned in the computer's memory such that the boundary's address is a power of two.

But correct me if I'm wrong ;-)

Cheers!!

Albert-Jan



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All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

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--- On Sat, 7/16/11, Albert-Jan Roskam <fomcl at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Albert-Jan Roskam <fomcl at yahoo.com>
Subject: [Tutor] what is 'doubleword alignment'?
To: "Python Mailing List" <tutor at python.org>
Date: Saturday, July 16, 2011, 8:23 PM

Hello,

What is 'doubleword alignment'? It is used in the following sentence: "Fill up the buffer with the correctly encoded numeric and string values, taking care of blank padding and doubleword alignment." 

I know that the buffer is comprised of variables of 8-bytes, or multiples thereof, each. Numeric variables are 8 bytes, char vars are at least 8 bytes. For example, a 10-byte value is 'ceiled' to 18 bytes. This is done with padding (spaces, I think). But the aligment part...?

TIA

Cheers!!

Albert-Jan



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All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

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