Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

    > As a general statement, that is valid -- but I think you're
    > overestimating Clang's effects on GCC.

    "tremendous harm to our movement" were your words.

That's right, but we are miscommunicating.

The harm is tremendous, but at the same time it is limited in range:
it affects C and C++.  It doesn't affect the other languages that they
don't intend to support.

If we were to take this as a reason to give up on resisting the use of
parts of GCC as part of a nonfree compiler (*), we would extend the
problems to the other languages.

    > Actually yes they were (though not with those words).  Someone cited
    > my decision against having GCC write a complete syntax tree.  That
    > output would make it easy to use GCC as a front end for nonfree
    > back-ends.  That would be tantamount to making nonfree versions of
    > GCC.

    I disagree.

Disagree if you like, but I think it is true in this case.
The case of M4 and Autoconf might not be comparable.


* When I say "nonfree versions of GCC", what I mean is the use of
parts of GCC as part of a nonfree compiler.  There are various ways
that could be implemented, but the harm is the same.

I won't always remember to state it so carefully.  Please don't
quibble when I don't.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.