Re: Patch to add BeOS/x86 support

[Jeffrey A Law <law at cygnus dot com>]

  In message <20000112115052.21549.qmail@pasanda.cygnus.co.uk>you write:
  > > Date: Wed, 12 Jan 00 06:54:07 EST
  > > From: kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)
  > > 
  > >     The folks at Be wanted 'gcc foo.c' to produce 'foo' rather than
  > >     'a.out'; this patch implements that change for the BeOS port.  How do
  > >     people feel about this inconsistency?
  > > 
  > > I don't like it.  I feel it's more important for GCC to be
  > > compatible with GCC on other systems than to be compatible with the
  > > native compiler in cases such as this.
  > 
  > Why?  As far as I know the rest of the world considers the default
  > name "a.out" to be a charming eccentricity from UNIX's ancient
  > history.  In my opinion this just makes us look silly.
  > 
  > I suppose that there is a downside to changing the default name, in
  > that it may break existing makefiles.  However, most properly
  > constructed makefiles explicitly set the name of the executable.
The a.out default is, IMHO lame.  However, I don't think we should change it,
at least in the Unix world.  The convention is far too old and established
to try and change it now.

I don't consider BeOS Unix, so I'm personally a little more open to letting
it fix some of the lameness that shows up in the Unix world.

jeff