CWG Issue 809 (original) (raw)

This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 117a. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2025-04-13


809. Deprecation of the register keyword

Section: 9.2.2 [dcl.stc]Status: CD2Submitter: UKDate: 3 March, 2009

N2800 comment UK 86

[Voted into WP at October, 2009 meeting.]

The registerkeyword serves very little function, offering no more than a hint that a note says is typically ignored. It should be deprecated in this version of the standard, freeing the reserved name up for use in a future standard, much likeauto has been re-used this time around for being similarly useless.

Notes from the March, 2009 meeting:

The consensus of the CWG was in favor of deprecatingregister.

Proposed resolution (September, 2009):

  1. Change 9.2.2 [dcl.stc] paragraph 3 as follows:

A register specifier is a hint to the implementation that the object so declared will be heavily used. [Note: the hint can be ignored and in most implementations it will be ignored if the address of the object is taken. This use is deprecated (see [depr.register]). —_end note_]

  1. Add a new section following _N3000_.D.4 [depr.string]:

register keyword [depr.register]

The use of the register keyword as a_storage-class-specifier_ is deprecated (see 9.2.2 [dcl.stc]).