Xref: utzoo comp.arch:6793 comp.lang.misc:2032
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!ken
From: ken@gatech.edu (Ken Seefried III)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Software Distribution
Message-ID: <17536@gatech.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 88 02:17:11 GMT
References: <1988Sep29.192410.246@utzoo.uucp> <997@esunix.UUCP> <1988Oct11.162611.25330@utzoo.uucp> <1988Oct13.202604.22464@ateng.ateng.com> <222@shockeye.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@gatech.UUCP (Ken Seefried iii)
Organization: School of Information and Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta
Lines: 29

In article <222@shockeye.UUCP> hermit@shockeye.UUCP (Mark Buda) writes:
>|Just a confirmation and a testimonial here.  C News Alpha runs just fine
>|on a '286, thanks much to Messrs. Spencer and Collyer.
>
>GNU CC, however, doesn't. I expected more from them... sniff...
>-- 

I'll be kind and simply call this kind of talk silly.  The 80286 is an amazingly
stupid design.  the GNU group made some assumptions (most of them pretty reasonable)
when the built gcc and its ilk.  One of the biggies was 32-bits implimented in a
semi-reasonable way.  The 80286 is niether 32-bits nor reasonably implimented.
Since the target audience for 'gcc' was 680x0, 32x32, etc. based, and the rest
of the world is moving that direction, and they wanted to produce a high
quality compiler, these requirments make a whole lot of sense.  I cannot believe 
the unmitigated gall of some people ( 'I expected more...' ).

'gcc' will not run on the PDP-11/2 in my closet, nor will it run on the old Z80-CP/M
machine that I use for a terminal, but then it was never ment to, so I tend not to 
bitch and moan.

Moral: if you want to run real software, get real hardware...

Oh, and please don't whine that its all that you can afford.  I know that story
inside and out (being a student, and having saved a whole bunch of pennies for
my computer).  

>Mark Buda / Smart UUCP: hermit@shockeye.uucp / Phone(work):(717)299-5189

   ...ken