psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) (10/16/89)
In article <42718@sgi.sgi.com>, karsh@trifolium.esd.sgi.com (Bruce Karsh) writes: > Has anyone figured out how to make volatile work in cfront? Are there any > plans to make volatile an official part of the language? > They are really useful when you are using shared variables. >Bruce Karsh, karsh@sgi.com It's dead, Jim. (Gee, that'd be sort of confusing; can we just call you Bruce?-) It's like this: In the beginning, there was C; and Ritchie wrote it, and he looked upon it, and he said it was good. And he and Kernighan wrote a book about it. And lo, the multitudes said, "Verily, it art good; but couldja add this couple of things to it?" And so Ritchie did so, and looked upon it with its new features (enum types and structure assignment), and he said it was still good. And he wrote a memo describing what he had changed, and if you were really hip, you managed to find yourself a copy. And lo, unto the the desert came a new prophet, and his name was Stroustrup. And he looked at C, and he looked back at Simula-69, and he glanced at the various flavors of Smalltalk, and he said, "Verily, there's some stuff I'd really like to use that ain't here." And so Stroustrup labored for many months, and he added classes to C, and data abstraction, and he provided a way to write co-routines (sort of like what were later called lightweight processes, I think, but send e-mail rather than posting if I'm wrong); and he called it (I'll bet you think you know what's coming) "C with Classes". And the magnitudes looked upon it, and as if with one voice, they said, "Huh?" (Except for at least one new MTS in Bell Labs, who looked upon the memo and drooled, and beat his head against the closet door because he understood it not.) And so Stroustrup did it again, and this time he called it C++. And the multitudes looked upon it again, and most of them studied it carefully, and nodded their heads wisely, and in unison (or at least in harmony) they did sayest, "Huh?" But the world was changing, and this time a few did figure out what the heck Stroustrup was talking about. And there were also in that region three-and-many wise persons, and they were called Implementors. And these Implementors did study the precepts of Kernighan and Ritchie, and they (if not their users) were hip enough to find the memo on extensions, and with or without the help of the Code of Johnson, they did write programs, and called them C compilers. And these Implementors did write run-time libraries for these C compilers. And many Implementors did Read The F***ing Manuals, and wrotest libraries that allowed users to bring applications from one platform to another without worry or fear. But among these Implementors, there were dark angels, who did not appreciate the creation that had taken place in the earlier days; and lo, they wrote compilers and libraries that were not compatible with other platforms. And these Implementors, along with their users, cast themselves down into dark pits, where they could no longer share code, or write interesting books with Kernighan again (though he's put out at least one science fiction novel, and *still* has a story that will appear in THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, if and when it's ever published. But that's another tale.-) And so these Implementors did meet, and they gathered themselves together, and they did form a Standards Committee. And they agreed to set down in one place an agreement of what was C and what was not C. And they agreed not to follow in the path of the Dark Implementors, and to codify only the existing art. And then some of the Standards Committee looked at the works of Stroustrup, and they said unto themselves, "Hey, this Barn fellow has some really hot stuff." And so they incorporated function prototypes and the const keyword into their Standard. And they looked upon their Draft Standard, and they saw it was good. And then an Implementor (no doubt seduced by claims made for the Dark Language) said, "Hey, aliases really, like, you know, bother me." And the other Implementors looked at aliases, and they saw that they were grody. And so they invented the keyword "volatile", which (among other things) would announce the presence of aliases. And they incorporated the "volatile" keyword into their Standard. And they looked upon their Draft Standard, and they saw it was good; or at least most of them thought it was. And it came to pass that Ritchie, who had strived to do really good global optimization in the presence of global pointers, had slumbered, rising only long enough to invent the Fundamentals of UNIX(R) Networking, which he called FUN, and which AT&T management later called "streams". And Ritchie woke to find the "volatile" keyword in the Standard for his beloved C programming language. And Ritchie did throw lightning bolts, and cursed the darkness, and pointed out the limitations in the "volatile" keyword, and pointed out how "const" wasn't all it's cracked up to be. (Try writing strchr() without casting a pointer-to-constant-char into a pointer-to-not-necessarily- constant-char.) And he threatened to curse all their Software Houses, and to vote against the standard. And the Implementors were cowed by this show of forceful argument, and they acquiesced. And they removed the "volatile" keyword from their Draft Standard, and they offered it to Ritchie; and he said it was good. And so all of the Implementors agreed to make their Draft Standard into an official ANSI Standard. And so it was done, except that one Fortran programming threw sand into the works, and we're still waiting for the paperwork to get finished. And then the Implementors turned their full attention to C++, and they said among themselves, "Oy, vey, here we go again." Paul S. R. Chisholm, AT&T Bell Laboratories att!pegasus!psrc, psrc@pegasus.att.com, AT&T Mail !psrchisholm I'm not speaking for the company, I'm just speaking my mind. UNIX(R) is a registered trademark of AT&T.
ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) (10/16/89)
In article <4176@pegasus.ATT.COM>, psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes: > In article <42718@sgi.sgi.com>, karsh@trifolium.esd.sgi.com (Bruce Karsh) writes: > > Has anyone figured out how to make volatile work in cfront? Are there any > > plans to make volatile an official part of the language? > It's dead, Jim. (Gee, that'd be sort of confusing; can we just call > you Bruce?-) It's like this: What Dennis Ritchie declared "non-negotiable" was not 'volatile' but 'noalias'. He wasn't opposed to the basic idea as such, but to kludging in an untried hack at the last possible minute. Volatile *IS* in the draft ANSI standard for C. > And lo, the multitudes said, "Verily, it art good; but couldja add I do hope they spoke better English than that. "art" is second-person singular present indicative. > And the multitudes ... did sayest, "Huh?" English again: "sayest" is second-person singular present indicative. > themselves, "Hey, this Barn fellow has some really hot stuff." And so I thought it was "Bjarne".
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (10/16/89)
In article <4176@pegasus.ATT.COM> psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes: >And so they invented the keyword "volatile", which (among other >things) would announce the presence of aliases. If you're going to be silly, at least you should get it right. "volatile" is still specified in the C Standard, and it has nothing to do with aliases. It was "noalias", which indicated a promise by the programmer that aliases were NOT present, that was backed out.
diamond@csl.sony.co.jp (Norman Diamond) (10/17/89)
In article <4176@pegasus.ATT.COM>, psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes: >> And lo, the multitudes said, "Verily, it art good; but couldja add In article <2441@munnari.oz.au> ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes: >I do hope they spoke better English than that. "art" is second-person >singular present indicative. Aren't they engineers? I thought the only engineers who spoke good English were from Northern Europe or Singapore. >> And the multitudes ... did sayest, "Huh?" > >English again: "sayest" is second-person singular present indicative. > >> themselves, "Hey, this Barn fellow has some really hot stuff." And so > >I thought it was "Bjarne". And who was complaining about English. You think they can spell --... uh, whatever language it is ...-- while they're sayesting verbally amongst themselves? -- Norman Diamond, Sony Corp. (diamond%ws.sony.junet@uunet.uu.net seems to work) Should the preceding opinions be caught or | James Bond asked his killed, the sender will disavow all knowledge | ATT rep for a source of their activities or whereabouts. | licence to "kill".
shap@delrey.sgi.com (Jonathan Shapiro) (10/25/89)
Dennis had a fit about noalias, not volatile. Noalias was semantic nonsense. Volatile has meaning in at least one context... Jonathan Shapiro Synergistic Computing Associates