• In case of a 32 bit word length, natural word boundary occur at addresses 0,4,8 as shown in the previous diagram.
• In general, words are said to be aligned in memory if they begin at a byte address that is a multiple of the number of bytes in a word
• The number of bytes in a word is a power of 2. So if the word length is 16 bits then we will have 2 bytes and aligned word begins at byte addresses 0, 2, 4…
• When the words begin at some arbitrary addresses then it is called as unaligned addresses. That is if a word is of two bytes ( 16 bits), instead of storing the words at 0, 2, 4… it may begin with 1 then 3 then 5 and so on

Accessing Numbers, Characters and Character Strings 

• A number usually occupies one word.
• Individual characters can be accessed by their byte address.
• The beginning of the character string is indicated by giving the address of the byte containing its first character.

Big Endian and Little Endian assignments << Previous
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