volatile isn't necessary, but it's there

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <7794 at alice.UUCP> dmr at 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.