noalias
John Stanley
dynasoft!john at stag.UUCP
Wed Apr 12 01:12:40 AEST 1989
[Doug Gwyn <gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL> 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 <dynasoft!john at stag.UUCP>
Software Consultant / Dynasoft Systems
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