Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU!jgm
From: jgm@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (John Myers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: 'const' functions (`noalias' vs `register')
Message-ID: <544@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: 18 Dec 87 19:23:34 GMT
References: <6829@brl-smoke.ARPA> <9753@mimsy.UUCP> <6830@brl-smoke.ARPA> <6845@brl-smoke.ARPA> <475@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Sender: netnews@PT.CS.CMU.EDU
Organization: System/Technology Development Corp.
Lines: 13

In article <475@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
 >Anyway, why are the Committee only doing half a job?  What's the
 >point of introducing NORMAL (the default being ABNORMAL) without
 >introducing REDUCIBLE (the default being IRREDUCIBLE)?  Having
 >the C compiler recognise that sin(x) or strlen(s) only needs to
 >be evaluated more than once in some complicated expression would
 >be more useful to me than making promises about pointers that
 >the compiler isn't apparently expected to check, and the 'noalias'
 >attribute on the arguments is not enough to allow that optimisation.

A reasonable syntax for such a thing would be to declare such functions
as being 'const'.  The overloading of the keyword would be analogous to
(but not the same as) the overloading of the keyword 'static'.