rc> Can I have a clarification: is alignment part of ISO C,
 rc> or just a handy addition that is supported by a few
 rc> compilers?

The lack of any *assumption* as to any specific alignment is part of ISO C.
And byte and word order, for that matter - alignment is a trivial matter
compared with endian-ness.

You problem, I think, is seeing this from a "PC" point of view.
While it might be occasionally `inconvenient', C was written to be as
portable as possible across all (or at least most) CPU architectures and
operating environments. As I've previously said here, alignment is
*necessary* on some architectures.

From the PC point of view, compiler vendors provide 1) the ability to force
a specific alignment, if one is required, and 2) a quality implementation
warns the programmer about structs with structure alignment dependancies
which use the default (compiler switch dependant) alignment.

---