Yeah I’ve dealt with “database” stuff where it was quicker and easier to just dump to ASCII, and re-import.

I don’t see how having it ‘break all logic’ as the default is a good thing. Somewhere some neckbeard is all smug about screwing up all kinds of data. Instead aligning by word/dword boundaries for games like that should have been something you had to explicitly turn on, you know for internal structures where it doesn’t matter, unlike say data to disk or network for exchange where it freaking matters which is which and where. Grrrrrr

I think I was taught that most compilers pack things in a certain way, but some don’t, so don’t assume anything if you want to be portable 🙂

which is a shame, as structures are taught as binary representations of data.

No wonder I had so many issues trying to migrate data out of 16bit pascal into 16bit/32bit C, and why text mode was the way to go…

shame on all the vendors trying to outthink data structures.