> >     I can understand the advantage of aligning structures which are
 > > used in memory; but for writing to records on disk I consider it a big
 > > no-no.

 > Yep.  Problems with accessing structures which are
 > aligned in a particular manner in memory may also occur
 > when one or more compilers/languages are involved.  I
 > guess the moral here is "know your compiler".

... or avoid writing code which is implementation specific. This latter
approach is better unless it cannot be avoided. Sometimes, however, some
loss in performance may be unacceptible.

So-called 'binary' files of any description are necessarily going to be
implementation specific, as is the operating system interface.

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