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.” ...

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 ...