Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!accuvax.nwu.edu!tank!shamash!com50!pwcs!stag!dynasoft!john From: dynasoft!john@stag.UUCP (John Stanley) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: noalias Message-ID: <0311891012400682@dynasoft.UUCP> Date: 11 Apr 89 15:12:40 GMT Reply-To: dynasoft!john@stag.UUCP (John Stanley) Organization: DynaSoft Systems, Minneapolis, MN. Lines: 30 X-Member-Of: STdNET (ST Developer's Network) [Doug Gwyn wrote...] > The "noalias" qualification was improperly specified, and consequently > spread its influence into internals of C library routines, etc. making > a mess that conforming programs would have to contend with. It probably > could have been fixed, but there was a big enough stink made about it > that it wasn't politically feasible to do otherwise than remove the > tainted word "noalias". No other proposal for providing similar > function was found acceptable to a 2/3 majority of X3J11. I still think that one of the primary failings with noailias was the term itself. It's too easy to take a look at "noalias" and have the language center of the brain balk with a [Well, if it isn't an alias, what is it?] type rection. (And the C programmer portion of the brain looks at it and says [What the hell's an "alias"?]) No, that doesn't directly have anything to do with the technical problems it introduced, but a more intuative term would have gone a long way twords making it easier to rectify the problems. A primary, ocassionaly ignored, rule of language design is, avoid defining something in terms of what it isn't... Using a word like "unique" instead would have given a compact explanation of what the qualifier actualy was trying to say, as aposed to "noalias" which was an adhoc term that really doesn't tell you anything at all...... Opinions? --- John Stanley Software Consultant / Dynasoft Systems