Why must bitfields sum to a multiple of a byte?

[Era Scarecrow]

On Tuesday, 31 July 2012 at 16:48:37 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> 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.

  I'd say it's not a bug since C/C++ is free to reorder the fields 
you'd need to tinker with it anyways; HOWEVER if you still need 
to be able to have it then who's to stop you from doing it?

  I think more likely a flag/version or some indicator that you 
didn't make a mistake, such as making them depreciated so it 
complains to you. Kinda like how you can't make assignments in if 
statements or do useless compares, it's an error and helps 
prevent issues that are quite obviously mistakes.