🚀 go-pugleaf

rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes:

>  There are two problems with this that I can see.  First, MS-DOS (and
>MacOS, currently) are too limited, and too different from Unix, to
>support the major GNU products without lots of modification.  Large
>GNU software (emacs, gcc) would be a lot of work to squeeze into, say,
>640K or even 2MB.

Gnu Emacs and the Gnu C Compiler (as well as binutils and a lot of
other utilities) have already been ported to the Atari ST (M68k) which
has the same OS interface as MS-DOS (substitute trap calls for ints).
Now M68k machines don't have all the limitations of the poor Intel
parts, so basically these are ports for a Macintosh running MS-DOS
(plenty of contiguous memory but a lousy operating system :-).

>  More important, I think, is that it would take a lot of time and
>effort which could probably be directed elsewhere with more effect.
>Having, say, GNU Pascal or GNU FORTRAN is more likely to help expand
>the free software base for the Unix world, which is where GNU (by
>their very name) seems to be working hardest and having (by far) the
>most impact.

It's already done.  I don't think it takes away from the GNU effort
since the people doing these ports are doing them for different
reasons than those people creating software from scratch.

Cheers!greg