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From: "Tim Behrendsen" <tim@airshields.com>
Subject: Re: C is 'better' than Ada because...
Date: 1996/07/31
Message-ID: <01bb7ea7$b971c5e0$96ee6fcf@timhome2>#1/1
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Date: 1996-07-31T00:00:00+00:00
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Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote in article
<dewar.838699292@schonberg>...
> Sandy said
> 
> "   The one big advantage C has traditionally had over other
>    languages is efficient compilation.  The reason is that 'C' is one
>    of the few languages that provides concepts such as register
>    variables to give hints to the compiler."
> 
> 
> This is incorrect. In practice the register declarations are useless to
> a modern optimizing compiler, and merely represent an unuseful attempt
> to intefere with choices that the compiler can make better anyway. Most
> modern C compilers, including gcc, pretty much ignore register
declarations
> (they cannot be completely ignored, since they introduce some (rather
ugly)
> semantic restrictions).
> 
> An exception to this is the extension in GNU C that allows global
variabels
> to be placed in registers. Here the programmer can do better than the
> compiler, since the compiler does not see the whole program.

Let me retract the register variable thing ... that is one of the
things compilers can do a halfway decent job on, and it doesn't
make my point very well anyway.  What's more important is the
very powerful C expression syntax where I can write expressions
that are easily optimized, and the ability to have very
close-to-the-metal pointers.

-- Tim Behrendsen (tim@airshields.com)