Re: GCC warnings for unused global variables

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at integrable-solutions dot net>]

Mike Stump <mrs@apple.com> writes:

| On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 09:43 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| > I think you got my messages wrong.
| 
| No, we understand what you are saying, we just disagree with it.

Certainly, there are obviously disagreement but it not true that you
understood what I said.  You posted an example that has nothing to do
with the point of disagreement.

[...]

| Our job should be to educate users as to what is practically portable,

Telling users that something has no well-defined semantics is
part of educating users about what is practically portable.  It is not
frightening them.  It is not scaring them.  However telling them that
volatile is well defined is far from being true.  If it were that
well-defined, there would not be so much discussions about it, either 
on GCC lists for years, at committee meetings, with proposals to
clarify it, etc. 

[...]

| I'm much rather you propose wording to add to the gcc manual that
| states exactly what you think volatile should mean, we can then debate
| it and agree and put it in, or disagree and try and have you adopt our
| view.

My point is that volatile is so fuzzy that different people have
different expectations of what it should do and any attempt of
clafirication would not meet expectations of some people, would break
some software written with another set of expectations in mind (if you
look at the archive, you'll notice that everytime one touches
volatile, it follows large (violent) debates); so probably
the least bad thing to do is to do nothing.

-- Gaby