Data packing

[douggilliland]

Unnecessary enhancement. All values use a long location regardless of their length. Could use space more efficiently (unnecessary enhancement). Just noting for possible future enhancements.

If we implement better packing we still need to make sure that when we go to a new data type that we long word align the addresses.

firstLong: .long 0x00000001
secondLong: .long 0x00000002
firstShort: .short 0x1234
secondShort: .short 0x5678
firstByte: .byte 0x99
secondByte: .byte 0x88
thirdByte: .byte 0x77
fourthByte: .byte 0x66

start:
00000000 42800000 lix r8,firstLong.lower
00000001 42800004 lix r8,secondLong.lower
00000002 42800008 lix r8,firstShort.lower
00000003 4280000C lix r8,secondShort.lower
00000004 42800010 lix r8,firstByte.lower
00000005 42800014 lix r8,secondByte.lower
00000006 42800018 lix r8,thirdByte.lower
00000007 4280001C lix r8,fourthByte.lower

[douggilliland]

Optimizing above would be:

00000002 42800008 lix r8,firstShort.lower
00000003 4280000A lix r8,secondShort.lower
00000004 4280000C lix r8,firstByte.lower
00000005 4280000D lix r8,secondByte.lower
00000006 4280000E lix r8,thirdByte.lower
00000007 4280000F lix r8,fourthByte.lower

[douggilliland]

It would be a bit tricky to test and make sure the address is long word aligned.
.long has to always be long word aligned.
.short has to always be short word aligned.
.byte can be any aligned.