Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: (So-Called) ANSI C
Message-ID: <6896@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 21 Dec 87 09:01:33 GMT
References: <4668@pyr.gatech.EDU> <3873@uw-june.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 13

In article <3873@uw-june.UUCP> pardo@uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel) writes:
>This is why I think pragmas are a better mechanism for doing things like
>``noalias'', etc.  I'm now a little bothered that the debate over whether
>to have ``noalias'' rages on yet nobody has talked about leaving the
>language alone and using pragmas to get the optimizations...

There are (at least) two reasons for this.
	(1) X3J11 proposed "noalias".  They did not propose a specific
	pragma for this.
	(2) A #pragma cannot, according to the rules, alter program
	semantics.  Therefore it cannot be used to obtain the kind of
	optimization that "noalias" permits, because that IS
	semantically visible.