Jeff Kell and Mark Bixby said:

Jeff:
>> Let's not forget yet another "Mark" of excellence... Mark Klein.  It is
>> his Gnu/gcc port that made much of this possible.  His efforts made many
>> porting efforts "tolerable" by providing a much more robust Posix middle
>> ground.

Mark:
>And gcc must have been a hard port to do.  My stuff just has to worry
about >conforming to POSIX; the other Mark has to take a Unix program and
teach it
>about PA-RISC and MPE internals like NMOBJ formats, etc.

Thanks, guys. While it took me something over 1000 hours over a period of
years to finally get it done, I must also give credit to Jeff Law from the
University of Utah (and there are probably others unknown to me) that did
the initial gcc port to the HP9000/7xx series and provided support to me as
I was fumbling all over the place with HP-UX and MPE differences. I leveraged
a lot of his work and finally managed to teach gcc and gas (actually
binutils)
how to speak the MPE flavor of PA-RISC.

While the initial port was difficult, it was the bootstrapping that was the
real
hard part. Today, I can do a port of a newly released version of gcc in
about a
weekend. But, back then, it was pretty gruesome. If anyone wants the details,
I'll be happy to provide them. I've thought about doing a case history on my
efforts and what it took to do the port to help the porters of the future,
but
ever since I finished the GNU environment, porting in most cases is pretty
easy.

Regards,


The Other Mark
--
Mark Klein                                              DIS International,
Ltd.
http://www.dis.com                                      415-892-8400
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