[CST-2] Comp Arch

[Matthew Richards]

> > 96/8/4
> > Why might a C compiler place a string literal on a word boundary when it
> > only needs to be byte aligned ?
>
> Unaligned Loads and Stores are slow, compared to aligned stores.

Unaligned copying is also slow, particularly for things like strings that
tend to be quite short (because of the overhead at the start and end of the
memcpy routine).  If you word-align your strings, you can use copy_aligned
instead.

> > What is the epithet RISC ?
>
> Reduced Instruction Set Computer (or Computing)

And if it's "epithet" you're worrying about, it just means "descriptive word
or phrase" - it doesn't really affect the meaning of the question.  One
could reword it as "Discuss to what extent the Alpha can be called RISC, and
..."

Matthew