Visual Studio and ALIGN?

[ScottBoyce]

I am compiling a large fortran computer model that contains lots of data types and pointers. The visual studio project under Properties then "Fortran>Preprocessor>Preprocessor Definitions" has the keyword "ALIGN". I have spoken with several other developers and no one knows why it was added. What that keyword does is add to the command line "/DALIGN"

I have tried searching the documentation and forums, but have been unable to determine what exactly this is doing. The code compiles just fine with our without the keyword.

Any opinions or descriptions what ALIGN is doing would be greatly appreciated.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The creator of that project wanted to add a preprocessor definition for ALIGN. This would be used in the code with something like:

#ifdef ALIGN
...

or 

!DEC$ IF DEFINED(ALIGN)
...

for conditional code. It has no special meaning otherwise. You won't find it in the documentation because it is meaningless to the compiler.

While the code may build fine without this, if there were conditional directives they might select the wrong code. Do a text search of the sources for ALIGN and see what turns up. If no preprocessor or conditional directives at all, then removing it is fine.