On 2/21/10, Dave Korn <dave.korn.cyg...@googlemail.com> wrote: > I too am having a hard time envisaging exactly who would be in this class of > users who are simultaneously so naive that they don't know about -march or > -mcpu or think to read the manual, and yet so advanced that they are trying > to > write programs for and rebuild modern compilers on ancient equipment....
Old equipment is retro in rich places, but we built the first public-access email lab from stuff found in skips in inner-city Sicily and were very glad that Slackware, Debian and so on ran on 386 and 486's. At that time "everyone who was anyone" had pentium MMXs at least. The point about defaults is that the GCC default tends to filter down into the default for distributions; if GCC had been following the "90% of people have Pentiums" rule, and the distros followed the default, our low-budget lab would have been two terminals instead of about a dozen (or had to run SCO Xenix or something). I'm ex-UK-university computing lecturer myself, but been both rich and poor, both many times, so I know how the other half lives. Incidentally, one of the hackers who used Linux in that Sicilian squat at the age of 13 has just been accepted to do a computing degree at Cambridge University, UK. Not this this *still* has anything to do with the thread, but it's Sunday, so... Bless M
