Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Whither _noalias_? Message-ID: <1991Feb9.051404.8297@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1991Feb7.050917.24550@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991Feb8.211734.22306@portia.Stanford.EDU> Date: Sat, 9 Feb 1991 05:14:04 GMT In article <1991Feb8.211734.22306@portia.Stanford.EDU> dhinds@elaine24.stanford.edu (David Hinds) writes: > That's a shame... Was it really that hard >to come up with a clear and useful definition of "noalias", or was it just >a result of committee politics fouling it up? Was the proposal to just >have "noalias" apply to function parameters? ... "noalias" was a qualifier, like "const" and "volatile", and could be applied to most anything. This may have been too ambitious, in retrospect. Doing something with function parameters and *only* function parameters might have been inoffensive enough to get by. (In fact, the standard lists as a "future direction" the possibility that declaring more than one parameter as an array -- remember that this is pointless today, since array parameters are really pointer parameters and might as well be written as such -- might someday come to mean "these are not aliases of each other".) I think it was exceedingly difficult to come up with a decent definition of "noalias", given its generality and the qualifier rules then in effect. Some very sharp people tried hard, since it was generally agreed that there *was* a real need. -- "Maybe we should tell the truth?" | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology "Surely we aren't that desperate yet." | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry