Scott Reynolds <scottr@plexus.com> writes:

>> > The
>> > chance you will not have an ANSI compiler is very small.  IMHO, the
>> > risk is worth the benefit.  gcc has already been ported to practically
>> > everything which it can run on, and new hardware comes with ANSI
>> > compilers.
>> 
>> Solaris and HP-UX _still_ do not ship with ANSI compilers; fortunately
>> there are well-tested gcc/binutils ports for those systems.  How confident
>> are you that this is the case for any other interesting systems, or that
>> the GNU toolchain is well tested on those systems?  (All too often it
>> seems like an upgrade to one or the other introduces bugs for the less
>> popular platforms they support, but that's purely a subjective
>> observation.)

Sooner or later, you're going to have to port gcc.  An operating
system without a compiler is, well, look at your examples :-)

Some OS's don't ship with a compiler at all, and some ship with
crippled compilers.  I'd be surprised if the hpux bundled compiler
could compile any interesting portion of netbsd; it's amazingly
castrated.  Using ANSI wouldn't prevent you from porting to one of
these OS's (if gcc didn't already exist), it just means you need to
come up with a bootstrapping compiler.  This is true in any case, ANSI
or not.  I claim that with old hardware, the problem is solved (gcc
exists), and with new hardware, the bootstrapping problem exists
regardless of ANSI.

In any case, this is clearly a religious war.  I'd probably have more
success convincing people to rewrite netbsd in Java :-)

		Marc