On 23 January 2013 09:15, Alec Teal wrote: > I was fearful of using the word attribute for fear of getting it wrong? What > is "this part" of the compiler called
I think attributes are handled in the front end and transformed into something in the compiler's "tree" data structures. FWIW I've usually seen this feature referred to as "strong typedefs". That brings to mind the "strong using" extension G++ had for namespaces, which (prior to getting standardised as "inline namespaces") used __attribute__((strong)) so that attribute already exists in the C++ front end: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Namespace-Association.html
