Ah, sorry, you're right I forgot about alignment. Yes, alignment is implementation defined, paragraph 16:

> Each non-bit-field member of a structure or union object is aligned in an implementation-defined manner appropriate to its type.

But, I still don't think that what you've said is true. This is because alignment isn't decided per-object, but per type. That bit is covered more fully in 6.2.8 Alignment of objects.

You also have to be able to take a pointer to a (non-bitfield) member, and those pointers must be aligned. This is also why __attribute__((packed)) and such are non-standard extensions.

Then again: I have not passed the C specification lawyer bar, so it is possible that I am wrong here. I'm just an armchair lawyer. :)

(but for padding, yes, that's correct.)