Re: GCC 4.4.0 Status Report (2009-03-13)

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

> would you mind elaborating on the philosophical issue here?

Yes, I would mind, because it's not MY issue, but RMS's!  I don't want
to speculate why RMS might not want to use C++

> > Similarly, which of two possible algorithms to use *can* be a
> > *detailed* technical issue, but stops being one if one of those two
> > choices has a patent issue.
> 
> By your analogy, which part of C++ do you consider
> has patent issue compared to Ada?

I don't follow.  My analogy was just to show two areas where what might be
considered "technical" decisions might touch on something larger, in one
case philosophy and in another patents.

If you're asking why RMS didn't object to the Ada front end being written
in Ada, the answer is that he would have preferred C, but it's always
acceptable to write all or part of a compiler in its own language.  E.g.,
COBOL would be an odd choice of a language to write a compiler in, but
quite reasonable if the language you're compiling is COBOL (and there is
such).  Also, there's a difference between starting from scratch with some
non-C language and converting a C program into one in a different language
(note RMS's "at least for programs that are presently written in C").