Re:The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (1987)
by ajross on Saturday May 23, 2020 @12:16PM
(#23284139)
> It would have to be a very exotic platform that still uses a pre-ANSI C compiler.
Not "exotic" so much, really. Obviously those days are long behind us now, but for many years the very last refuge of K&R C was the bootstrap compiler for gcc.
By the 90's, for revenue and product differentiation reasons all the big Unix vendors had moved their optimizing toolchains into their "developer" software packages and out of the base system. But for legacy compatibility reasons they still needed a working K&R C compiler in /bin/cc.
So for almost two decades, the only contact working engineers had with pre-ANSI compilers was using them to bootstrap a real compiler (gcc) on their new, fancy, high performance, very mainstream and non-exotic workstations.
Not "exotic" so much, really. Obviously those days are long behind us now, but for many years the very last refuge of K&R C was the bootstrap compiler for gcc.
By the 90's, for revenue and product differentiation reasons all the big Unix vendors had moved their optimizing toolchains into their "developer" software packages and out of the base system. But for legacy compatibility reasons they still needed a working K&R C compiler in /bin/cc.
So for almost two decades, the only contact working engineers had with pre-ANSI compilers was using them to bootstrap a real compiler (gcc) on their new, fancy, high performance, very mainstream and non-exotic workstations.