Tim Peters wrote: > [Thomas Heller] >> ... >> And I never had tried it before on a sparc machine - all the intel and ppc processors >> seem to have no problems with it. > > Pentiums don't enforce "natural" alignment restrictions, but run much > slower on unaligned access (varying by specific chip model, and > generally more heavily penalized as time goes on). In the good old > days, Pentium was one of dozens of competing architectures, and was > the oddball in catering to unaligned access. Now it's eternal > "backward compatibility" with an early implementation accident. Most > other architectures never catered to unaligned access, or did so only > at the cost of generating an interrupt so that kernel-mode software > could fake unaligned access. Bottom line is that unaligned access > isn't portable and never was, and even on architectures where "it > works" it can be extremely expensive to use it. I was astonished to find out that also the ARM processor on Windows CE doesn't support unaligned accesses. When one thinks about it, it probably makes sense on small devices. Thomas
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