Re: GCC2 merging (was "native language support now available")

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    > An interesting exercise would be to look at the ISO 9000 standard and
    > see if either project meets it and to try to figure out what SEI level
    > each project has.

    Is this a serious suggestion?

Just as a thought exercise.  Actually obtaining the ratings would be quite
expensive even if it did qualify.

    No GNU project that I know of would even begin to qualify for
    either.

That's my sense too, but I think it would be very illuminating for
many people to see precisely *why* they won't since these are issues I
suspect most people don't think about much.

    This is actually one of my biggest problems with these efforts. You
    have to be so deep into the source code of the product before you can
    even begin to consider participating in the development on any
    substantial basis. When I do software development, I don't write a
    line of code until I've got a good overall design on how its going to
    work. This simply doesn't exist.

Right.  That was my comment yesterday: I think the major thing missing
from GCC is good internal documentation, saying precisely what the
interface to each function is, including what assumptions it makes
about its input.