COBOL alignment

COBOL structures are mapped as follows. Working from the beginning, each item is aligned to its required boundary in the order in which it is declared. The structure starts on a doubleword boundary.

If you specify the SYNCHRONIZED phrase, then BINARY and floating-point data items are aligned on halfword, fullword, doubleword boundaries, depending on their length. If SYNCHRONIZED is not specified, then all data items are aligned on a byte boundary only.