Avoiding "assignment from incompatible pointer type" warning

[John Love-Jensen]

>  Furthermore, there's no way to determine the required alignment of a type.

The GCC compiler has an extension to C and C++, which does allow the
programmer to determine the required alignment of a type.

But that facility is a GCC specific language extension, and not part of C or
C++.  (Take this as a HUGE RED WARNING FLAG.  If you use GCC's compiler
specific extensions, you have committed to programmig in GCC-C or GCC-C++,
not in C or C++.)

--Eljay