What's the purpose of the CIL nop opcode?

Question

I\'m going through MSIL and noticing there are a lot of nop instructions in the MSIL.

The MSDN article says they take no action and are used to fill space if the opc

Answer 1

Do the .NET compilers align the MSIL output? I'd imagine it might be useful for speeding up access to the IL... Also, my understanding is that it's designed to be portable and aligned accesses are required on some other hardware platforms.