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From: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Porting GCC to Atari ST
Message-ID: <15901@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 20:22:10 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.15901
Posted: Mon Mar 30 20:22:10 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 1-Apr-87 04:27:50 EST
References: <3450@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <975@ames.UUCP> <2822@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU> <1090@ames.UUCP>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mtn View, CA
Lines: 39
Keywords: C GCC Gnu FSF
Summary: I disagree with the assumption

In article <1090@ames.UUCP>, fouts@orville (Marty Fouts) writes:
> To the audience to which I addressed my note -- the Atari ST user
> community -- the word "compiler" implies producing a runable image
> from a source program, which is the meaning I took from the first
> request and was responding to.

This is a meta-note on the above comment by Marty. I disagree that the
"Atari ST user community" is unable to distinguish between a compiler
and a linker. To me personally this seems somewhat of an insult to the 
intelligence of the entire net, but I may be just over sensitive.

> I am also leary of individuals who assume that the portion of the
> community of experts that they belong to is "most".  To most of the
> compiler writers (about 10) that I know, "compiler" means two
> things, depending on the context.  When marketing a product, they
> think of compiler in the way users do -- as a way to generate a
> runnable binary from source code -- when working internally, they think
> of "compiler" as that part which translates the source representation
> into some format (possibly text assembly, possible binary load
> modules) which is processed by the rest of the user's "compiler".

Actually it is primarily the UNIX cc interface that conveys this 
misconception. If you include the base of MS-DOS users who use MicroSoft
or Lattice C, you will find that they expect to run a linker to make
the .EXE file after compiling the source into object modules. Besides
the frontend 'cc' the only other really popular 'all-in-one' compiler I
can think of is Turbo PASCAL. 

Further I would contend that it is a disservice to the naive user community
to redefine the meaning of the word compiler to refer to something that
creates and executable directly from the source. Since this same user
might unknowingly buy a 'compiler' that conforms to the definition that 
has been in use for the last 20 years and find out it did not do the 
linking automatically. 

-- 
--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.