iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

Michael Brian Bentley bentley at crenelle.com
Tue Jul 3 00:46:26 PDT 2007


LuKreme says:

>And you base this one what, exactly?  there were _NO_ C compilers 
>that were freely available before gcc, and no evidence whatsoever 
>that there ever would have been.

GCC work was started around 1985, and was started using another 
compiler system for a bootstrap.

I also believe there was a portable C compiler out there during the 
early 80s that Stallman may or may not have known about.

-m

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/01/bull01.txt


----------------------------------------------------------------------
February 1986        G N U ' S   B U L L E T I N         Volume 1 No.1
----------------------------------------------------------------------

			      Gnu Status
			by Richard M. Stallman

4. C compiler

Although I have a portable C and Pascal compiler, it has a serious
drawback: it is a very large program, and intrinsically cannot be made
smaller.  It is also very hard to bootstrap.

The problem is that most of the compiler is written in Pastel, a
super-hairy extended Pascal, and it is also the sole compiler for that
language.  To make it smaller, we must eliminate the hair needed to
compile Pastel; then we will not be able to compile Pastel, so it must
all be rewritten into C.


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