Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!linus!philabs!ttidca!mb
From: mb@ttidca.TTI.COM (Michael Bloom)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.pyramid
Subject: Re: Pyramid architecture/asm
Message-ID: <1582@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 20 Dec 87 13:25:42 GMT
References: <8712181926.AA00242@brillig.umd.edu>
Reply-To: mb@ttidca.UUCP (The Mb of all Evil)
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 25

pete@BRILLIG.UMD.EDU (Pete Cottrell) writes:

>>	The information _is_ proprietary, and normally distributed only to
>>	customers with a source license. 

> I've never understood this. Whatever happened to the basic right to write
> assembler code or to look at what a compiler is generating and understand it?

Even Pyramid's source customers don't get much in this area.  We don't
get source to any of the members of the compilation suite. To be fair,
they did send us a tape of the source to the preprocessor, cpp, on a
special need basis, but only because it contained no hints as to the
nature of their compilation techniques.  We'll probably have to fight
for this again when buying the source to their next release.

For such reasons, much of our local software remains unported.  The main
reason I do all my work on other machines is that the Pyramid is the only
BSD machine we have that GDB (the GNU debugger) does not run on.  Faster
execution just does not make up for having to use inferior tools (such as
dbx or sdb, in this case).

Michael Bloom, Citicorp/TTI
--------------
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are entirely my own. They are not
to be construed as representing those of my employer.