[vram22]

"The GNU people who originally wrote GCC (Stallman, et al) wanted to use Lisp; they write in C instead because it was well supported on Unix-like system."

Interesting, did not know they wanted to use Lisp for GCC, though I've read some about Stallman's work.

Edit:

Makes sense, I guess. I've read that functional languages are well-suited to the domain of writing language compilers. Seems logical, because a transformation from, say, a C program to assembly or machine code, can be thought of as a function call:

y = f(x)

where x is the C program, y the machine code, and f the compiler :)

"Stallman is a Lisper; he was on the ANSI CL committee and of course is well known for the Emacs work."

True.

[kazinator]

On this same topic, see this amusing comment in the middle of Bash:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/unwind_prot.c

Firstly, the non-local jumps that handle Ctrl-C in Bash and whatnot are referred to using the "unwind protect". Then see the comment in that file:

  /* I can't stand it anymore!  Please can't we just write the
     whole Unix system in lisp or something? */

:)