Now, after Peter's and Berend's answers I'm a bit confused... Could someone clear things up for me, please? Note, I'm talking about gpc, not about other compilers or about the standard. Peter Gerwinski wrote:

Why is this so, e.g. with an array of something which has 3 bytes?

Program Test;

Type r = packed record x: ShortWord; y: Byte; end (* r *);

Var x: packed array [ 1..1000 ] of r;

begin writeln ( SizeOf ( x ) ); writeln ( SizeOf ( x [ 1 ] ) ); end.

The output is 4000 and ... 4. To avoid alignment problems in an "array of r", the record `r' has size 4, not 3.

BTW: Does this mean if you have var a:r; b:byte; then 1 byte after a will be "wasted" though b could fit into it? It has to be so if sizeof(a)=4, if someone does "move(...,a,sizeof(a))". -- Frank Heckenbach, Erlangen, Germany heckenb@mi.uni-erlangen.de Turbo Pascal: http://www.mi.uni-erlangen.de/~heckenb/programs.htm Internet links: http://www.mi.uni-erlangen.de/~heckenb/links.htm