jgm@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (John Myers) (12/19/87)
In article <475@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >Anyway, why are the Committee only doing half a job? What's the >point of introducing NORMAL (the default being ABNORMAL) without >introducing REDUCIBLE (the default being IRREDUCIBLE)? Having >the C compiler recognise that sin(x) or strlen(s) only needs to >be evaluated more than once in some complicated expression would >be more useful to me than making promises about pointers that >the compiler isn't apparently expected to check, and the 'noalias' >attribute on the arguments is not enough to allow that optimisation. A reasonable syntax for such a thing would be to declare such functions as being 'const'. The overloading of the keyword would be analogous to (but not the same as) the overloading of the keyword 'static'.