noalias (was: Re: the "const" qualifier)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <11391 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>Our technical editors (mostly Dave Prosser and, before him, Larry Rosler)
>invested a tremendous amount of effort in trying to get the wording to
>say what the committee had agreed we should be saying...

I should elaborate a bit on my uneasiness about late wording changes.  The
problem is that the public review process necessarily reviewed the document
*as written*, not as the committee "agreed it should be saying".  Some of
the comments along the lines of "well, we finally worded const so it says
what we meant" tend to make me feel like saying "if the changes were that
significant, should they not have had public review?".

>... section 3.1.2.5... the "Types" section.  In previous drafts,
>there had been a technical term "top type" which was introduced solely to
>help explain type qualification.  During every public review we received
>comments about this, usually starting off "What is this trying to say?"

Actually, the ones from me included phrases like "impenetrably obscure",
"impossible to figure out what the authors meant", and "the current
definition is incomprehensible nonsense".  It was, too.  And if you tried
to figure it out on the law-of-least-astonishment rule, you got the wrong
answer!  (For one thing, a "top type" was not a type at all.)  I was really
dismayed that it took *two* public reviews for this to sink in on X3J11.

The Oct 1988 wording finally fixed this, and seems to have fixed it right...
but this is what I meant, above, about wording changes being significant.
I'm a little uneasy about what happened between Oct 88 and Dec 88.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu