🚀 go-pugleaf

A few weeks ago, James Kanze wrote a followup to an question I posted
about whether the draft standard contained anything to support the
validity of some code from "Advanced C++" which appeared to rely on
the assumption that a static array of char would be guaranteed to
be suitably aligned for holding any data type.  In part, he wrote:

> In defence of Jim Coplien, I'm too lazy to look up the exact example,
> but from the name (LAPD), I'd guess that this is a class whose data will
> be read from or written to an external source, and which because of
> this, will only contain byte data anyway.  (LAPD is the name of the
> layer two protocol in the OSI protocol suite.)  If this is the case, his
> example should work anyway.

James:

Sorry it took me so long to respond to your hypothesis above, but
the news server at our site started dropping articles on the floor
just about the time you posted the quoted article, and I only now
came across it using the DejaNews search service.

The LAPD class contains (among other things) some pointers, which
would choke on many machines if the alignment requirements were not
satisfied.  The answers I got confirmed my suspicion that the 
assumptions on which the quoted code was relying were invalid.

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/* Bob Kline                                       Stream International */
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