Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!PEPRBV%CFAAMP.BITNET@husc6.harvard.EDU
From: PEPRBV%CFAAMP.BITNET@husc6.harvard.EDU (Bob Babcock)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: noalias comments to X3J11
Message-ID: <12578@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 23 Mar 88 04:07:14 GMT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 11

>>`Volatile,' in particular, is a frill for
>>esoteric applications, and much better expressed by other
>>means.  Its chief virtue is that nearly everyone can forget
>>about it.

What about an interrupt routine which receives control on a keyboard
interrupt and sets a globally known flag.  That doesn't sound very
esoteric to me, and volatile seems exactly what is needed to describe
such a flag to the compiler.  (I also do some of my coding in an
environment where some variables are hardware registers which may
change due to external events.  That's less common, but I wouldn't
call it esoteric either.)