noalias

[John Stanley]

[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