[Paul Rubin, presumably asking about word-addressed machines]
>  What machines are those anyway?

Generally high-performance number-crunchers, like several flavors of Cray
and the original Alphas.

>  How do they deal with byte arrays?

Painfully.  Here's a paper about Alphas:

   http://www.research.compaq.com/wrl/DECarchives/DTJ/DTJO08/DTJO08SC.TXT

When C was first implemented on Crays, "byte arrays" were purely a software
fiction.  By convention, we stored a 3-bit byte offset (64-bit words were
the smallest addressable unit) in the *high*-order bits of a pointer.  The
compiler then generated oceans of shift and mask operations accordingly.
short, int and long were all 64 bits.  This was a good test to see whether
programmers had read the C std <wink> .


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