Thanks for Glenn Hess’s article “U.S. Seeks Tighter Rail Safety Rules” (C&EN, Aug. 18, page 22). However, the word “volatile” is misused when he writes that “ethanol is less volatile than crude oil.” ...

An erroneous term. Storage devices, including magnetic disks and tapes, solid state disks (SSDs) and rewritable optical discs, hold their content permanently until purposely changed (they are non ...

volatile warns the optimizer that a variable can change without notice, so we need to know why that would ever matter. And for that, we’ll take a quick glimpse into the logic of (one type of) compiler ...

How to take advantage of the volatile keyword in C# to ensure that concurrent threads get the latest value of an object The optimization techniques used by the JIT (just-in-time) compiler in the ...