Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: noalias
Message-ID: <6889@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 20 Dec 87 01:26:50 GMT
References: <7552@alice.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 23

In article <7552@alice.UUCP> dmr@alice.UUCP writes:
>Why could not they have left well enough alone?

I certainly sympathize with Dennis's point of view; I'm not terribly
fond of "noalias" (nor, for that matter, some other things in the
proposed standard) myself.  However, in defense of X3J11, I suggest
that there was a perception on the part of many committee members
that things were not "well enough" as they stood.  In the end, it
seems to come down to a matter of what one considers important to
include in a language standard.  Many people, including Dennis, I
believe, do not think that features intended solely to aid
optimization belong in the language.  (Of course, "register" is
already one such!)  Others were insisting on them, and the "noalias"
approach seemed the least offensive, if one had to have anything at all.
I must say that adopting "noalias" did defuse an effort to permit this
kind of optimization for "normal" code, which I would have considered
a terrible tragedy, or to bollix up the semantics of "const", which
matters less to me but which would have caused AT&T (and at least one
other company representative) to oppose the proposed standard.

I think that "noalias" is technically sound, but perhaps not viable
for political or even stylistic reasons.  I'm sure there will be many
public comments on this one!