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Padding is the technique of keeping some amount of space between two different elements in some data stream. GNU poke provides two different ways to express sequences of data elements: the fields of a struct type, which are defined one after the other, and elements in an array.
We call adding space between two struct fields esoteric (or internal) padding.
We call adding space between two array elements exoteric (or external) padding.
The following sections contain examples of the two kinds of padding and how to better handle them in Poke.