=item *
You must yourself do any alignment or padding by inserting for example
-enough C<'x'>es while packing. There is no way to they could know
-from where the bytes are coming from, they might be coming from a
-completely different system than the one your script is running in.
-Therefore C<pack> (and C<unpack>) handle their output and input as
-flat sequences of bytes.
+enough C<'x'>es while packing. There is no way to pack() and unpack()
+could know where the bytes are going to or coming from. Therefore
+C<pack> (and C<unpack>) handle their output and input as flat
+sequences of bytes.
=back
$foo = pack("ccxxcc",65,66,67,68);
# foo eq "AB\0\0CD"
+ # note: the above examples featuring "C" and "c" are true
+ # only on ASCII and ASCII-derived systems such as ISO Latin 1
+ # and UTF-8. In EBCDIC the first example would be
+ # $foo = pack("CCCC",193,194,195,196);
+
$foo = pack("s2",1,2);
# "\1\0\2\0" on little-endian
# "\0\1\0\2" on big-endian