Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!lll-tis!oodis01!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wsccs!terry
From: terry@wsccs.UUCP (Every system needs one)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Noalias trivia question
Message-ID: <530@wsccs.UUCP>
Date: 14 May 88 05:05:00 GMT
References: <56@lakart.UUCP> <1164@maccs.UUCP> <5995@utcsri.UUCP>
Lines: 18

In article <5995@utcsri.UUCP>, norvell@utcsri.UUCP (Theodore Stevens Norvell) writes:
| As an aside: One idea that has been circulating about noalias is
| particularly silly.  That is that the purpose of noalias is to
| make the life of compiler writers easy.  This is bunk.  The more
| you add to a language the more special cases and interactions the
| compiler should handle in order to get the best code possible.
| The purpose of noalias is to allow the user to get the best code
| possible in a machine independent way by allowing the compiler
| to optimize in the 99% of the cases where the optimization is
| safe.

This is not bunk, unless the optimizers are not considered as part of the
compiler.  If an optimizer IS part of the compiler, as is suggested by
"optimizing compiler", then anything that makes writing the optimizer easier
makes writing the compiler easier.  The same applies to making volitile a
keyword rather than a #pragma.

				terry@wsccs