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

The first assembly I learned was SPARC so I'm familiar with the branch delay slot, if you can't fill it with another instruction, usually the instruction you were going to put above the branch instruction or increment a counter in loops, you use a NOP.

I'm not familiar with cracking, but I think is common to overwrite the stack using NOP so you have not to exactly calculate where your malicious function begins.