I have posted a question here about alignment; I got a
some answers by mail and followups. I'll summary the
question, and I'll try to annalyse the problem.

The question was: what does alignment means from a standard
point of view ? What can/can't you do in conforming code
because of this notion ? Can you justify your opinion about
alignment with an extract from the standard ?

I don't care if some code which has undefined behaviour, and
so is unportable works fastly on a 68020 than on 8086. That's
_not_ the point here (we are in comp.STD.c++).

I cc this article to Josee Lajoie to get her opinion on
that.

Alignment seems important in two cases:

(1) when reinterpret_casting a pointer to A to pointer to B,
    where B has stronger alignment requirements

(2) when reading/writing through a pointer to a type
    different from the declared type

I'll handle these issues one by one:

(1) reinterpret_casting to stronger alignment requirement