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Element alignment
By default, the elements are tightly packed in memory, one after each other.
You can alter this behaviour by specifying alignment modifier. It can take 3 different values:
1.byte, for 1 byte alignment
2.word, for 2 byte alignment
3.dword, for 4 byte alignment
The default packing is on byte level, so you don't really need to specify it.
In case you want to pack values aligned to 4 byte steps, you might consider using DWORD modifier.
Let's have a look at this example:
TYPE RGBColor
R AS BYTE
G AS BYTE
B AS BYTE
END TYPE
By default, the size of RGBColor will be 3 bytes, as you can verify with SizeOf:
msgBox SizeOf(RGBColor)
3 elements, each 1 byte in size.
To apply 32bit alignment, use DWORD modifier:
TYPE DwordAlignedRGBColor DWORD
R AS BYTE
G AS BYTE
B AS BYTE
END TYPE
This means that R, G and B elements will still be of byte data type, however their element offset will change to 4 byte jumps.
You can verify it easily:
DIM colorNormal AS RGBColor
msgbox strFormat$("The offset of .R is {1}, .G is {2} and .B is {3}",
UDT_ElementOffset(colorNormal.r),
UDT_ElementOffset(colorNormal.g),
UDT_ElementOffset(colorNormal.b))
DIM colorAligned AS DwordAlignedRGBColor
msgbox strFormat$("The offset of .R is {1}, .G is {2} and .B is {3}",
UDT_ElementOffset(colorAligned.r),
UDT_ElementOffset(colorAligned.g),
UDT_ElementOffset(colorAligned.b))
