The proposed replacement doesn't actually have the same semantics as restrict. I believe that Pascal knows this, as he's a smart guy. Consider memcpy; its arg

The proposed replacement doesn't actually have the same semantics as restrict. I believe that Pascal knows this, as he's a smart guy. Consider memcpy; its arguments are declared restrict. This not only means that the source and destination pointers cannot be the same (which is what Pascal's "replacement" says), but also means that the buffers cannot overlap at all (i.e. the src pointer cannot be anywhere in the range [dst-(length-1), dst+(length-1)]). restrict also has the virtue of making this contract apparent to your callers, as it's part of the API. People should know that they can't call memcpy with overlapping buffers, and use memmove instead. If the information is instead encoded in a cryptic line in the implementation, then it isn't obvious to a developer who intends to use the function.