Re: struct __attribute((packed));

[Paul Koning <pkoning at equallogic dot com>]

>>>>> "E" == E Weddington <ericw@evcohs.com> writes:

 E> Paul Koning wrote:
 >> It sure would be useful, though, if there were a construct that
 >> does mean "pointer to packed T".  In particular, I've often needed
 >> "pointer to packed int" and found no way to produce that.  I ended
 >> up creating a one-member struct with a packed int inside, which is
 >> a syntactic nightmare.  (The application was a piece of legacy
 >> code that was writing via int pointers, but sometimes things were
 >> not aligned.  The fix was much more invasive than it should have
 >> been because I could find no way to define a pointer to packed
 >> int.)  If there IS a way to do that, it sure would be nice for the
 >> docs to explain it.  Right now the documentation of "packed" is
 >> essentially unintellegible.
 >> 
 >> 
 >> 
 >> 
 E> According to the docs here:
 E> <http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.3/gcc/Type-Attributes.html#Type-Attributes>

 E> what about doing something like this?:

 E> ------------------------------------------- typedef int packed_int
 E> __attribute__ ((aligned (1)));

 E> packed_int *ppi;

That would make sense, but it has never worked for me.  It seems that
attributes don't apply to type names, only to variables and members. 

	   paul