What exactly is an 'aligned pointer'?

Question

Would somebody please tell me what an aligned pointer actually means?

Answer 1

As people have mentioned before me it means that your pointer is evenly divisible by a certain number of bytes.

To check if your pointer is aligned you can do this:

isaligned = !( (long)pointer % bytes );

Now, "isaligned" is true if "pointer" is aligned to "bytes" bytes.