MIPS assembly error

[Jeff Baker]

> Your first example used .word.  The MIPS assembler automatically
> aligns .word values to the natural alignment.  That introduces an
> implicit alignment directive, and in the first pass gas is not
> immediately sure how much space that will take up.

Could this be handled in a subsequent pass?  i.e. After gas knows how 
much space this will take up could it come back and try to simplify 
anything that initally spanned multiple frags?