encoding info in mis-aligned pointers

[Jim Cromie]

pardon the lack of clue I reveal here, but..


on 32 bit box, a void* has 3 values which are illegal/unaligned;

void* ptr;
if (ptr & 0x00) {
/* ok */
} else {
/* some exceptional situation */
}


is there any concievable use of this which doesnt interfere with legitimate bus-errors (ie existing unaligned pointer handling) ?

struct bigstruct* bp; could have many more 'reserved' misaligments