Why must bitfields sum to a multiple of a byte?

[Andrej Mitrovic]

On 7/31/12, Era Scarecrow <rtcvb32 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>   I wonder, is it really a bug? If you are going to have it fill a
> whole size it would fit anyways, why even put it in as a
> bitfield? You could just declare it separately.

I don't really know, I'm looking at this from a point of wrapping C++.
I haven't used bitfields myself in my own code.