[ On Monday, August 14, 2000 at 18:37:50 (-0400), Andrew Brown wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Postfix
>
> of course...unix also used to come with a c compiler.  how many
> commercial unix systems still do, now that susv2 has marked it
> "legacy", and therefore, not "required".
> 
>    http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/intro.html#tag_001_003_003

That's a revisionist view history and misinterpretation of the reference
on your part!

The real reason the compiler was dropped from full releases was both
that they wanted to charge a separate licensing fee for the compiler and
customers wanted to buy the compiler separately (disks were still small
back then and lots of people didn't want the compiler wasting space, as
well there were those who knew it was making the base OS price higher
than necessary and were constatnly complaining).  Also everyone (well at
least Sun and AT&T) at the time were making improvements in their
compilers, and even writing whole new ones.

The reason I say you've mis-interpreted that particular web page is
because it in no way indicates that a C compiler is a legacy feature of
the standard -- what's marked as a "legacy" tool is "cc", aka K&R C, or
as the page you can link to from there says "The cc utility is an
interface to an unspecified C-language compilation system."  If you look
up c89 in the same standard you'll find it is *not* a legacy tool!

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>