Comment 1 for bug 1250023

There is a branch that already does this, see lp:~anj/epics-base/alarm-strings
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~anj/epics-base/alarm-strings/revision/12440
I had not considered making this change on the 3.14 branch, but if you think it's worth doing and that it won't break existing code I can move it to there.