------- Comment #3 from malitzke at metronets dot com 2007-06-21 14:33 ------- Thanks for helping out again. Enjoy Japan. I was there quite often, dealing with NEC and Mitsubishi, but as a buyer representative for for multi-million $ projects. At that level it was pleasure to do business, even enduring sitting cross-legged on the floor; washing down raw fish with japanese whiskey on the rocks. But to matters at hand.
What is called a compiler is actually a crime against traditional usage of the term. "compilare to plunder; 1: to collect into a volume 2: to compose out of materials from other documents" this more accurately describes the function of a traditional loader. A, so-called, compiler is really a translator. In the case of GCC the Italian saying "tradutore; traditore" translator; traitor seems appropriate. I know how hard it is to do technical translation, but that was my first well-paid career at about 15 years of age. My third career was being a real-time assembly language programmer. I received a letter of commendation as a super-programmer for committing the following programming crimes 1) jumping into the middle of instructions; 2) writing self-modifying code. You do what you have to do to put food on the table. I actually jeopardized a three month engagement by showing with the help of simple queuing theory that the project (in-spite of the above tricks) was doomed to fail. The COBOL manager assured me that I was doing a marvelous job squeezing code into 128 byte overlays and not to worry about over-all design. They bought back that contract. In my fourth career I was termed by the company president to-be "our secret weapon" for writing specifications, contracts, and inter-national standards that with-stood the test of legality but were blatantly uni-sided in favor of my employer (very good money). Now, being retired and considering the C and FORTRAN compilers as quite important tools in my UNIX tool-chest; I am trying to prevent GCC being destroyed by mis-interpretation and mis-use of standards legal shenanigans, etc. My loyalty is to "my" tools and not to the people involved with GCC or even GCC as now interpreted. See PR32347. Incidentally, two quotes from K&R "Again because the language reflects the capabilities of current computers, C programs tend to be efficient enough that there is no compulsion to write assembly language instead" (Intro 1st ed). '(ANSI) established a committee whose goal was to produce "and unambiguous and machine-independent definition of the language C" while still _retaining_ its _spirit_'. Preface 2nd Ed, emphasis added. Ritchie got a "Turing Award" and the current crop of people should respect the creator's wishes. If they want to make changes against that original design and call it something else; just as Ritchie acknowledges BCPL. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32447
