Olivier Grant wrote:
Well due to the fact that floats are represented on 4 bytes, there shouldn't be any padding involved. Padding normally occures when certain member variables of a structure require certain alignment constraints or just for efficiency, but this shouldn't occur with a vector class (at least that is my understanding).
It is the same thing with alignment. the beginning of the structure is placed on a certain boundary but doesn't affect the padding of elements within the structure. You could set this vector class to be 16 bytes aligned if you wanted to use them with SSE instructions, and you can still access the member with the array operator without problems.
On a 64-bit system the compiler might align to 8-byte boundaries. Also if you want a generic vector class you can't assume anything like that. Also for indexing with x,y,z/[0,1,2] all union tricks are out if you want to support UDTs. P.S. there is a mailing list that might be of interest to some in this discussion. http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=49012