Re: Lazy default attributes

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Joern Rennecke wrote:

> If there are a lot of symbols being declared - and that's the case when
> we care about compilation time - you'll spend much more time in checking
> every symbol for being in the list that should get default attributes,
> than if you just set up definitions at the start.

This isn't a question of saving time (though a hash table can certainly be
used if time consumption seems to be a problem): once format attributes
attach to the function type (so they can work with function pointers, work
properly with methods in certain cases, etc.) rather than to a list of
function names (and note that every function call currently gets the
function name and assembler name compared against all listed format
functions), they need to get added to the function declarations when or
after those declarations are created.  I don't want to create many more
"built-in functions" that aren't built-in just to attach these attributes
to them.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk