[SystemSafety] Aliased Variables

Derek M Jones derek at knosof.co.uk
Fri Dec 29 17:33:52 CET 2017


Paul,

> Finally, the question then becomes 'Which languages would allow such easy
> non-visible aliasing that it could not be detected at compile time?'

For a lot of languages aliasing could be detected, if enough resources
were thrown at the problem.  And of course, a lot of the time they are
not.

> With the ethos of Forth fully in play, the creation of global variables is never
> very intense. Most passing of values between functions is managed via the

That figure of 10,000 global variables is ridiculously high.  I suspect
it's all the global variables in all the programs combined, rather than
an average per program.

Also, what is counted as a variable?  Technically, 'variable's do not
exist in C, but 'object's do.  Have all identifiers having 'file'
scope (technically, C does not have 'global' scope) been counted?

Me thinks somebody wanted a big number to bandy about.

-- 
Derek M. Jones           Software analysis
tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com


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