Does GCC's __attribute__((__packed__)) retain the original ordering?

Question

Purpose

I am writing a network program in C (specifically gnu89) and I would like to simplify things by reinterpreting a certain

Answer 1

Based on what you're trying to do, I'd highly encourage you to also used fixed-size data types (ie. uint32_t, int16_t, etc) that are found in stdint.h. Using fixed-size data types will prevent you from having to do things like the following:

struct name
{
    short field : 8;
};