Fair enough - I had arrived at a similar thought when reading about the ATTRIBUTES...however, I have not provided all the information about my situation. I'm attempting to align a C structure with a FORTRAN common AND get them to page-align in shared memory (using CreateFileMapping & MapViewOfFileEx).  An approach was using the compiler directive shown in my example above along with .asm files compiled with MASM to declare the variables as PUBLIC (with the appropriate C decorations).  So, as it turns out, you kind of can use !DEC$ ATTRIBUTES C, EXTERN for variabels even if that wasn't the intended use.  This approach actually works so long as the variables in the COMMON are not arrays.  Anyway, not important.  I'm now trying to scrap the directives & asm files to go with a more sane (and hopefully somewhat standard) approach at getting page-aligned COMMONs.  I should also mention that this is F77 code, so MODULE etc. are not available.  The sample code below works great for a single program, but when I create a second program and try to pass (void *)(int)(&shm__.var1) to MapViewOfFileEx() I get the following from GetLastError():

ERROR_MAPPED_ALIGNMENT1132 (0x46C)

The base address or the file offset specified does not have the proper alignment.

which I believe tells me that (the start of) my structure (or COMMON) is not aligned to a page boundary and i'm not sure how to force it to be using Visual Studio's linker.  Do you have any input on how to force page alignment of COMMONs?  thanks again for you input!  I may be able to attach some VS project files with src if it would help...

C PROGRAM:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

extern struct {
   int    var1;
   double var2[2];
   short  var3;
   float  var4;
} shm__;

extern void app1(); // fotran subroutine

int main( int argc, char **argv )
{
   shm_init(0);
   
   app1();
   
   for (;;) {
      fprintf(stderr,"var = %d, var2[0] = %f, var2[1] = %f, var3 = %hd, var4 = %f\n",shm__.var1,shm__.var2[0],shm__.var2[1],shm__.var3,shm__.var4);
   }
   
   return (0);
}

FORTRAN SUBROUTINE:

      SUBROUTINE app1()
      
      IMPLICIT NONE
      
      integer          var1
      double precision var2(2)
      integer *2       var3
      real             var4
      
      common /shm__/
     * var1
     *,var2
     *,var3
     *,var4
      
      var1    = 10
      var2(1) = 8342.123
      var2(2) = 1234.5678
      var3    = 2
      var4    = 101.5
      
      RETURN
      END

Actually, I didn't misunderstand.  I saw what you were saying, and after reading about ATTRIBUTES in detail, I agree that the C part shouldn't be included....however, I was using that sytnax for variables and it was working.  Now I realize that, even though this worked, it was a kludge and not what ATTRIBUTE C was intended for.  To demonstrate my (mis)use/abuse of 'EXTERN, C' please take a look at my attached example.

I did not know '!DEC$ PSECT /foo/ ALIGN=PAGE' existed - that seems very promising...I will be looking into that approach today and will post back with results.  Thanks again!