Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ 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. ]]]

    > Copyleft is needed to defend freedom, which is why Clang is so harmful
    > to our freedom.  There are already nonfree versions of Clang that do
    > tremendous harm to our movement.

    Quite so.  And there is no point in foregoing potential benefits in
    order to protect assets that we no longer have exactly because Clang's
    progress has demolished them.

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

    > Allowing nonfree versions of GCC would not help us "win" anything that
    > matters -- it would only mean surrender.

    Sure, but nobody was talking about "allowing nonfree versions of GCC".

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.

Splitting up GCC would have the same effect.

The lookup and completion features that people want can be implemented
by making GCC answer questions sent to it, as Aspell does for M-$.
That change would be welcome.  I think it could be implemented using
GCC's existing plug-in mechanism, but it would be better to put
the code into GCC itself.

-- 
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.