Misaligned accesses with MS ARM compiler

From: Alan Gillespie (agillesp_at_qualcomm.com)
Date: 04/28/04 

Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:39:54 +0100

Does anyone know of a way to tell the ARM compiler that a WORD or DWORD pointer addresses an object that is not (or
might not be) aligned on a 16 or 32 bit boundary?

Effectively what I want to do is this:

BYTE *pBuffer = malloc(something);
WORD *pWord = (WORD *) &pBuffer[arbitrary_offset];
DWORD *pDWord = (DWORD *) &pBuffer[another_arbitrary_offset];

*pWord = word_value; /* May be misaligned */
*pDWord = dword_value; /* May be misaligned */

I have tried various versions of #pragma pack() without success. I could, of course, use WORD and DWORD temporaries and
memcpy() into the array but that is messy. There are other, equally messy, workarounds involving byte manipulation.

The problem arises because I am porting a large amount of code that was written for the ARM ADS compiler, which has such
a facility.

Thanks,
--Alan Gillespie.