On Fri, 31 Jan 2025 at 11:57, Frederick Virchanza Gotham via Std-Proposals <std-proposals@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 9:24 AM Jonathan Wakely wrote:
>
> If the object isn't accessed while in unaligned memory, why does
> the value of the underlying bytes of that pointer matter in the slightest?
> They're just bytes, not a pointer value, aren't they?



Purely as a hypothetical, if sizeof(char32_t*) < sizeof(void*), then
the pointer might not have enough bits to store the address of an
unaligned byte.

Yes, I understand that. So what? Why should that be changed?

 

Of course this will never happen -- but the C++ Standard accommodates it.


But why is it a problem?