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- Path: sparky!uunet!auspex-gw!guy
- From: guy@Auspex.COM (Guy Harris)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.misc
- Subject: Re: Compilers for install (was: Planning to upgrade to Solaris 2?)
- Message-ID: <13695@auspex-gw.auspex.com>
- Date: 23 Jul 92 06:52:27 GMT
- References: <1992Jul22.113847.21418@lut.ac.uk> <1992Jul22.162029.15381@news.duc.auburn.edu> <1992Jul23.002455.2061@afterlife.ncsc.mil>
- Sender: news@auspex-gw.auspex.com
- Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
- Lines: 29
- Nntp-Posting-Host: auspex-gw.auspex.com
- Nntp-Posting-Host: auspex.auspex.com
- Originator: news@auspex-gw.Auspex.COM
-
- >Re the recent flamefest over unbundling C: Sun's decision to unbundle
- >Fortran was the best thing that ever happened to it. Does anyone
- >remember f77cvt, the preprocessor that was needed to translate VAX
- >Fortran (a usable language) into the yukky, unusable, ANSI-standard
- >glop that was all the BSD Fortran compiler could handle?
- >Thank goodness Sun decided to write their own compiler.
-
- Well, actually, Sun'd "written their own compiler", in some sense,
- before they unbundled the FORTRAN compiler; they'd put their own back
- end on it, and their own optimizer on it, even though the front end was
- still basically Berkeley's variant of Stu Feldman's front end.
-
- And, at least at one point, when I was at Sun I took at look at the
- source to one version of the UNbundled compiler, and the front end
- still looked very much like Feldman's "f77"s front end....
-
- Dunno if they subsequently threw out the old front end and wrote a new
- one, or put the VAX and Cray FORTRAN syntax into the old one.
-
- So I don't know how much the decision to unbundle FORTRAN had to do with
- the decision to improve it. And even if they *had* thrown out and
- rewritten the front end, that wasn't a *necessary* consequence of the
- unbundling; the unbundled C compilers have front ends that are, I think,
- derivatives of the old bundled C compiler's PCC front end, and AT&T's
- SVR4 ANSI C front end, respectively, for the non-ANSI and ANSI versions.
-
- Besides, they didn't unbundle the VM system, and they still decided to
- rewrite it, so unbundling is probably neither necessary or sufficient
- cause to rewrite something.
-