Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: volatile
Message-ID: <1988Mar29.004454.2867@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <12578@brl-adm.ARPA> <1988Mar25.172355.348@utzoo.uucp>, <588@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 88 00:44:54 GMT

> >... such things generally are confined to the bowels of the operating
> >system, where they belong.
> 
> 	And would you mandate that C never be used for writing operating
> systems (one of it's original purposes)? ...

Nobody is saying that the concept is not necessary in certain specialized
situations.  The point is that these are a sufficiently small subset of C
applications that the need should addressed with #pragma, rather than by
cluttering up the type system with it.  The principal problem with #pragma
is that it is not portable, since its semantics are not standardized, but
the sort of code we're talking about isn't portable anyway.
-- 
"Noalias must go.  This is           |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
non-negotiable."  --DMR              | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry