Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: volatile isn't necessary, but it's there
Message-ID: <7624@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 7 Apr 88 16:15:33 GMT
References: <7794@alice.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <7794@alice.UUCP> dmr@alice.UUCP writes:
>Has anyone else noticed that a lot of the more peculiar things that X3J11
>has added (volatile, and especially noalias) are there for the
>benefit of compiler writers and benchmarkers, and not for the user?

As I suspect Dennis knows, by far the majority of the X3J11 committee
are C implementors or at least represent the interests of C implementors.
The "user advocates" sometimes have an uphill battle, especially on
issues that are perceived as affecting the marketability of C compilers.
A C vendor quite naturally wants to be able to claim that its compiler
results in faster benchmark times than the competition's.  Thus, the
implementor representatives tend to favor features that allow a high
degree of optimization.  The MS-DOS C market in particular appears to be
highly competitive along these lines.

I don't really know a way to counter this inevitable trend other than to
show up at the meetings and try to represent a user's viewpoint.