On 27 May 1997, Marc Horowitz wrote:

> No, it simply means you need to have an ANSI compiler.  ANSI is 8
> years old, which is approximately forever in computer time.

I have a number of computers running NetBSD that are older than that;
given that one of our goals is specifically to be able to support these
old systems, I will have to disagree that the issue of having an ANSI
compiler is not significant.

> 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.)

--scott