Subject: Re: Languages Was: CVSup collections for a NetBSD CVS tree
To: Andrew Reilly <andrew@lake.com.au>
From: Simon Burge <simonb@netbsd.org>
List: current-users
Date: 05/03/1999 10:22:54
"Andrew Reilly" wrote:

> On Sat, May 01, 1999 at 06:05:14PM -0700, Brian D Chase wrote:
> > If someone is intending to write a good piece of software, it's best to do
> > "the right thing" and implement it in a way which maximizes the number of
> > systems which can benefit from it.
> 
> Isn't this tantamount to saying that C (perhaps even K&R C) is the
> last language ever (to be) developed in which a tool can be written
> for NetBSD?

If C wasn't available on _all_ of the architectures that NetBSD uses,
either NetBSD wouldn't exist or we wouldn't have the number of ports we
have now.  In the source tree we have shell scripts and C++ programs.
In the package system we have python and perl to name a few.  All of
these are available on all ports for NetBSD - Modula3 isn't.

I'm pretty sure that if M3 was part of egcs (or some other _widely_
ported compiler system) we probably wouldn't be having this long-winded
"discussion" and everyone would have been happily running CVSup for a
long time...

Simon.