Alignment of Data Objects

Alignment of Data Objects

If fields are of type I or F, they are aligned. If structures contain type I or type F components, they are also aligned and filler fields may be inserted in front of them. The alignment of such fields or structures occurs because type I and type F fields occupy special platform-specific addresses in memory. For example, the address of a type I field must be divisible by 4 and the address of a type F field must be divisible by 8.

The system normally aligns fields and structures automatically during their declaration.

You only have to pay attention to the alignment in the following cases:

if you pass fields or structures as parameters to subroutines which require another type for that parameter (see Passing Data Using Parameters )

if you change the type of a field symbol (see Determining the Data Type of a Field Symbol) or define a structured field symbol (see Defining Structured Field Symbols).

if, when using Open SQL statements, you have work areas which do not have the same type as the table work area (see Database Tables and SQL Concepts).