On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 04:24:06PM -0400, Andrew MacLeod wrote: > On 5/18/22 14:13, Segher Boessenkool wrote: > >"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!
Glad to hear that, and this isn't set in stione yet! > Is there a commonly used alternate term to describe an observable effect > on the value of an input operand? I'd use something with "known" in the name. But: As far as I understand what you are doing this is not an effect on the operand at all! It cannot be one even, the operand is an input only after all. Instead, it changes what is known about the value of that input: it cannot be 0 in this case, it is known to not be 0. This is similar to other known value things we have in GCC already. Can you not just use one of those, even? What are the benefit to this new abstraction? Segher
