Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)

[jsa@organon.com (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <4q707h$1r2@krusty.irvine.com> adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan) writes:

> jsa@organon.com (Jon S Anthony) writes:
> >In article <dewar.834584250@schonberg> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
[...snip...]
>  >> When we discussed putting pragma Assert into the language (i.e. into the
>  >> standard), it was this point that tripped us up, and resulted in it being
>  >> left out. We could not figure out how to formally define the notion that
>  >> the compiler should NOT be allowed to use the assertion for optimization
>  >> purpoes.
>  >
>  >This is _almost_ as wog-boggling as the goof-up of not directly
>  >supporting specification of mutually recursive types across packages.
>  >
>  >Really.  It is incomprehensible.  I suppose these people don't want
>  >_any_ optimizations?  No?  Well, how do they justify all that
>  >"intrusive" code movement and elmination that happens with
>  >"standard/traditional" optimization?  What about ranges?  They can be
>  >seen in various contexts as just being a limited form of assertion.
>  >And those are taken advantage of all the time for "intrusive"
>  >optimizations.  I suppose they positively have paroxysms over this.
> 
> I have to agree with Jon's point here.  I don't see any reason why the
> definition of the language would have to prevent the compiler from
> using the information for optimization.  If the customer didn't want
> that to happen, the vendor could add a command-line option or pragma
> to tell the compiler not to.  Don't Ada compilers already have
> command-line options and/or pragmas to control how much optimization
> takes place, anyway?

Yes.

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
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