Packed Structures?

[Paul Asente]

Packed structures sound like a great idea.  Earlier this summer I had
to deal with a device that required certain 32-bit integer quantities
to be aligned on 16-bit boundaries in its command packet format.  The
solution I ended up coming up with is one of the all-time great kludges
of my life (involving storing the longs as arrays of 2 shorts and doing
pointer coercion all the time) and everything would have been much
easier if I could have just said to pack the array the way I specified
it!

	-paul asente
	    (decvax, ucbvax, allegra, ihpn4)!decwrl!asente