Keep in mind that a variable declaration, such as a struct, is designed to be a "public" representation of the variable. It's used not only by your compiler, but is also available to other compilers as representing that data type. It will probably end up in a .h file. Therefore, if a compiler is going to take liberties with the way the members within a struct are organized, then ALL compilers have to be able to follow the same rules. Otherwise, as has been mentioned, the pointer arithmetic will get confused between different compilers.
