Sorry if the question sounds stupid. I'm only vaguely cognizant of the issue of data alignment and have never done any 64-bit programming. I'm working on some 32-bit x86 code right now. It frequently accesses an array of int. Sometimes one 32-bit integer is read. Sometimes two or more are read. At some point I'd like to make the code 64-bit. What I'm not sure is whether I should declare this int array as `int` or `long int`. I would rather keep the width of the integer the same, so I don't have to worry about differences. I'm sort of worried though that reading/writing off an address that isn't aligned to the natural word might be slow.