Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!umd5!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: volatiles
Message-ID: <7748@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 24 Apr 88 16:34:16 GMT
References: <1394@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1530@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <1412@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <2584@ttrdc.UUCP> <10242@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <10242@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> jss@hector (Jerry Schwarz) writes:
>The introduction of "volatile" changes the situation. ...
>I still think that it's a good idea but I no longer think (as I used
>to) that it is a simple one.

My opinion is that "volatile" provides a hook for implementation-specific
control over accesses to variables that might be botched by optimizations.
However, there is no portable meaning for "volatile".

Its main advantage lies in its ABSENCE, which gives the implementation
license to optimize the hell out of it (so long as aliasing is properly
maintained).