Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: a couple quickies Message-ID: <6967@brl-smoke.ARPA> Date: 7 Jan 88 01:58:25 GMT References: <11140@brl-adm.ARPA> Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) ) Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD. Lines: 48 In article <11140@brl-adm.ARPA> TLIMONCE%DREW.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes: >My understanding is that the drafts and the actual standard are released >into the public domain. Correct? I can't give a definitive answer to this. The X3J11 committee working drafts have been neither Copyright nor published. Some standards are Copyright, but I don't know if any ANSI or ISO standards are nor whether this one will be. That is not something that X3J11 decides. >If so, would their be any problems >with someone sending copies of the next draft electronically? If I get >a hard-copy, I can scan it into an ASCII file and send it to anyone who >asks. The master source for the draft is troff input, using a possibly modified version of the -mm macros, I believe. It has not been made available electronically to anybody that I know of, despite requests, because it is not in the committee's charter and there is no volunteer to take care of doing this. Until the question about Copyright is resolved, you shouldn't copy the document in any form. >"exclusive" as a keyword instead of "noalias". Maybe someone has an >even better suggestion that "exclusive". Also, this is the first keyword >which is a compound word (I think). Is this a trend? The second choice for the name was "unaliased", which is still somewhat negative in tone. I don't think the name matters too much so long as it's an unusal formation (to avoid conflicts with existing code). I doubt that it's a "trend". It was with great reluctance that even this keyword was added; there shouldn't be any more. > for (i = 0; i == 100; i++) foo(&i); >If foo() does something like: "*i = 0" will this loop ever complete? No (assuming the last `i' is a pointer to the earlier one), for the obvious reason. C loop indices are not special, they're just variables. There are enough sequence points that all side-effects occur within the loop body, so the test `i == 100' will see 0 in `i' each time. There are ways using "noalias" that you could take advantage of a compiler's ability to exploit special loop instructions in such a situation, but it couldn't legally happen by default. >Is it better to combine all these messages or send out a couple short ones? If they pertain to separate issues, they are better off in separate messages, but for many of us it doesn't matter much.