Re: "Documentation by paper"

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    Everybody with less than guru knowledge of gcc asks, why.  And why CSE
    propagates addressof into memories.  And who takes care of it for
    nonoptimizing compilation.  And whether it is even needed for
    nonoptimizing compilation.  And the flow of thought goes on.

Indeed.  The ADDRESSOF addition was one that gave GCC a lot of
trouble, precisely because of the issues you raise, that its semantics
were very poorly defined.

I see that as cautionary that we need to do better in the future, not
as something to emulate into the future!

    Passes that are developed right now, especially as part of the
    tree-ssa work (but also Jan and Zdenek's rtlopt work), work at a
    different, more generic level, and require a different kind of culture
    on the reader.

Perhaps, but we have to be very careful of setting too high a level of
knowlege to know to be able to work on GCC.  Sure, if you're working on
subtle parts of these algorithms, you need to understand them "cold", but
an overview description is essential for those doing minor work in these
files.

As I said, the Bison manual even defines the term "symbol".  That sort of
approach seems the appropriate one to me.