Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!mcvax!ukc!castle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: BISON, GCC, and the GNU public license. (Re: increasing yacc states)
Message-ID: <714@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Aug 89 20:56:45 GMT
References:  <26@ark1.nswc.navy.mil> <26609@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5271@ficc.uu.net> <14699@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> <95@euteal.ele.tue.nl>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 40

In article <95@euteal.ele.tue.nl> mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout) writes:
>Why for Gods sake do you want to get your hands on the code.
>Working in  an academic environment means that you're doing
>some more or less fundamental research.

In academia, we teach courses.  And some of the courses involve
compilers, operating systems, etc.

Not only that.  Academics often write new compilers, operating
systems, etc. and it's nice not to have to start from scratch.

>I'm working in an academic environment and my work has never depended
>on stuff I got from the net. In fact that stuff often doesn't work
>(especially if X is involved).

I use stuff from the net and GNU software all the time and it often
works better than much of the commercial software I've used.  So your
experience is not universal.

>What gnu does is rewriting the easy parts and give them away.

When you say "the easy parts", you make it sound like GNU software
isn't very good and, indeed, rather trivial.  Perhaps you think C
compilers are trivial.  Gcc is one of the best C compilers I've seen.

>Their support is nop.

We get new releases fairly frequently.  I've had much worse service
for commercial software.

>On our hp835 for instance, gcc is not running.  If it would run it
>would probably be much slower than the hp compiler so why use it.

Maybe it produces better code.  In any case, gcc is faster than the
supplied C compiler for the machines I use, and the code is quite fast.

>It's rather dumb to believe that a couple of students and some people who
>are wasting away their bosses time can provide all the software we need.

What are you talking about?