Albert-Jan Roskam wrote:
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.
Yes, you are right. It means that the storage of your data should always be aligned with addressable locations on your computer. The computers addressing scheme may not be linear and may not correspond to the "word" size in the programming environment. (eg The old Intel 8086 CPU used a segment:offset addressing scheme that meant any given memory location could be addressed in multiple ways. This was great for clever multi-tasking schemes but murder for normal computing because variable addresses could easily get messed up and accidentally overwrite other bits of data. Other CPUs have other schemes and running 32bit programs on 64bit hardware is another example where the two don't match!)
Ensuring that the programming view of memory and the hardware view matches up is A Very Good Thing(TM)...
HTH, Alan G. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
