Error recovery (long)

[Walter Bright]

In article <312 at uw-nsr.UUCP> john at uw-nsr.UUCP (John Sambrook) writes:
>While on the subject of compilers, I would like to share two other features
>of this compiler that I find useful.
>The second feature is the ability to declare certain data structures as
>"read only." This is done via a compiler switch "-R" and applies to all 
>data structures that are initialized to a constant value within the 
>compilation unit.
>
>	int a = 1;					/* "read only" */
>	main() {
>	    	int	b;				/* "read / write" */
>
>		b = a;		/* this is legal */
>		a = 2;		/* this is not */
>	}

The declaration for a can be made 'read only' by declaring it as follows:

	const int a = 1;

Doing an assignment to a will then cause a syntax error when compiling.
This is in the draft ANSI C spec.