source mgt. requirements solicitation

[Robert Dewar]

> The fact is, the "big" things get a lot of mental attention, because they
> are sexy from a development standpoint, so people tend to think about hard
> problems like register allocation when they think about "compiler
> development". But I don't really think the big things are even as
> important as getting all the little things right.

I absolutely agree with this, and indeed if you are involved in a commercial
compiler company as I am, you know this from every day experience. We do not
get many customers complaining about register allocation :-)

> Don't get me wrong - gcc has made _major_ strides in things like C++ and
> Ada support, but maybe one source management approach would be to actually
> split off the languages somewhat, and make development easier by having
> fewer dependencies (not worrying about breaking C++ when doing Java,
> making bootstraps faster etc).

I also agree with this point.