Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Meat and Potatoe Programs Message-ID: Date: 20 Jul 89 20:55:33 GMT References: <5527@oregon.uoregon.edu> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Bob Sutterfield Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 30 In-reply-to: jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu's message of 20 Jul 89 19:53:32 GMT In article jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) writes: In article <5527@oregon.uoregon.edu> joe@oregon.uoregon.edu (Joe St Sauver) writes: I also wish NeXT would distribute the BSD compilers (fortran and pascal, say) with the machine! Both f77 and [Berkeley] pascal are pcc-based, and NeXT has abandoned pcc for GNU c. That would mean either porting the backend of pcc, or adapting f77 and pascal to run with gcc. Either option is messy and time-consuming, and neither language is as important to a Unix machine as a good C compiler. Other languages will soon be available to use the GNU code generator backend. Already there are C and C++. There were reports in gnu.gcc recently of Modula-2 and Modula-3 projects. I seem to recall Pascal and FORTRAN work under way as well. This work is being done in the community at large, and the code being accepted by FSF, for the reasons J describes: GNU won't use other languages much, and Stallman prefers to spend time perfecting his C implementation. Of course, all the other languages benefit from his back-end work, but they're not the main thrust. I imagine that when Absoft showed up interested in porting their Fortran with object-oriented extensions, NeXT jumped at it. They gain some needed third-party support, and cut development time. Who knows how much time might pass between the incorporation of new language support for the GNU compiler backend, and its appearance in a NeXT product? After all, NeXT 0.9 shipped (early May 1989) with a compiler based on GCC 1.26 (from Aug 18 1988).