Richard Stallman on Writing rm, ls, and cp (Also Working on Bison)
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2021-05-10 10:10:02 UTC
- Modified: 2021-05-10 10:34:45 UTC
Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation's founder, explains what programs he developed in the eighties
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[00:00]
(intro music)
Roy: Which was the first GNU project or GNU program, officially?
RMS: The first one to be released, you mean?
Roy: Yeah.
RMS: I believe it was GNU Emacs. There were other programs written before then but they weren't really worth distributing. For instance, I wrote rm and ls and cp, but I didn't
[00:30]
see that anyone would care about them by themselves. So I didn't release them. Those were ways I got used to writing programs to run on UNIX and thus to be part of the system like UNIX. The first GNU program I worked on was Bison. Now, I didn't start from zero. Bison was basically running but it didn't have many of the features that Yacc had and for it to really do its job as a replacement for Yacc it needed
[01:00]
all those features. So I added those features, and some more. And I did that first because I wanted to use it to write the C front-end for our compiler.
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