Orphaned Response

[karl at haddock]

Note: In my earlier posting I came to the tentative conclusion that the "dead
function" concept (a function which never returns, e.g. exit) would probably
not be sufficiently useful to be worth adding a new builtin type.  I haven't
changed my mind; I just want to point out some possibilities.

dataio!bright writes:
>In article <86900019 at haddock> karl at haddock writes:
>>[2] It won't be usable much.  This is a valid point.  There were a *lot* of
>>nonvalued int functions before void was invented; there are only a handful
>>of standard functions that are dead-ends.
>
>Functions that never return are used a LOT in code that is loaded
>with self-debugging assertion macros:
>           #define assert(e) ((e) || printmsgandexit("e",__LINE__,__FILE__))

But there are typically a very small number of such functions (usually one)
per application.  (Btw, I wouldn't want to assume that a dead function can be
the right argument of "||".)

>A good optimizer can make some important optimizations [with register usage,
>information about global and indirect references] if it knows that a
>function will never return.

Good point.  I hadn't thought of that type of optimization.

Another "advantage" of an explicit declaration for dead functions is that,
logically, one should be able to cast from "dead" into any other type -- a
feature not available with "void".  Since the code that would implement the
cast is never reached, it need not do anything.  This would allow
	extern double atod();
	extern dead abort();
	x = isfloatstr(s) ? atod(s) : abort();
which is a pretty bad example, so let me try again.

"pointer to dead function" (I can't really call it "pointer to function
returning dead", can I?) could be cast into "pointer to function returning T"
for any type T.  This would allow
	extern T f0(), f1(), f2(), f4();
	extern dead abort();
	T (*)() tab[] = { f0, f1, f2, abort, f4 };

Note that this can ALREADY BE DONE using an implicitly dead function.  The
functions in libc are declared "void" (that being the closest match), but it
is perfectly legal to write
	double bomb(char *s) {
		write(2, s, strlen(s));
		exit(1);
	}
An explicit "dead" declaration, with permission to cast to other types, would
seem to be more sensible.  (Though I think I'd want to require the cast to be
explicit.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl; karl at haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint
(The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of the author.)