On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Jim Wise wrote:

> [...] I find it hard to believe
> any new platform will ship without ANSI C, [...]

It has already been shown that HP-UX and Solaris are among the `new'
systems that do not ship with ANSI C.  I'm sure you can find more `new'
systems that don't, and asserting the existence of a reliable gcc port for
all of them -- especially new hardware! -- is a risky proposition at best.
(Are you aware of how long it took to get a functional GNU toolchain[*]
for the HP PA machines, much less a reliable one?  How about the Alpha?) 

While other parts of your argument make sense to greater or lesser
degrees, this part of it ignores demonstrated facts.

--scott

[*] As far as I can tell, binutils-2.7 was the first release to support
HP's debugging tools.  This caused our engineers considerable annoyance,
and many of them reverted to debugging with printf (a few started using
Turbo C 3.0 %-).