If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose those of us who worked on Unix should be very flattered. I just wish they had imitated the programming style and sense of taste. The gcc manual is 500 pages -- bigger than the entire Unix distribution. The options alone are almost 100 pages. The average line in the source code is an ifdef of some machine you've never heard of. If you are doing anything the slightest bit unusual (e.g., increasing the default stack size) you need a different option for each machine target. Hmm, I thought the point of C was to be portable...
I recently started using clang, and I'm never going back to gcc. I feel so much cleaner now...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From:
chet.
ramey@case.
edu
To:
"Ron Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com>, "Larry McVoy" <lm@mcvoy.com>, "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc:
<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Sun, 17 Sep 2017 14:37:59 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!
On 9/16/17 8:59 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
> RMS hates UNIX. That was clear in the original manifesto. But he's also
> a megalomaniac and believes that if you even use a GNU tool your work
> becomes his.
Nah, this is BS. Stallman might not like Unix, and he clearly has a very
large ego -- as do many of us here -- but that "belief" is just crap. The
thing that comes closest to it is bison, and the output of bison is
explicitly excluded. There is the issue of GPL libraries (like readline),
and that's a pain for people who want to link with them, but that doesn't
count as "even use a GNU tool."
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet@case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/