On 5/18/22 14:13, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 02:39:11PM -0400, Andrew MacLeod via Gcc-patches wrote:
I haven't checked this patch in yet. This implements a side effect that
the divisor cannot be 0 after a divide executes. This allows us to fold
the divide away:
"Side effect" already has a meaning, very commonly used in language
theory, and even in the C standard itself: a function has a side effect
if it does something more than just return a value: if it changes state.
This can be some I/O, or it can just be writing to some non-local data.
Side effects are crucial to what a compiler does, and they are used all
over the place (the gcc/ dir has some thousand mentions of it for
example).
Please don't make life hard for everyone by overloading this term.
I'm open to suggestions for a better term!
Is there a commonly used alternate term to describe an observable effect
on the value of an input operand?
Andrew
