I understand. What I mean is that if your word-size is not your addressing-size, you'd better not have a concept of mis-aligned accesses. It's trouble you brought on all by yourself.
The cray did this, iirc, and the result was that char pointers were extra fat because they needed to include the word address and the byte address within the word. That's not an efficiency improvement.
tedunangst|8 years ago