AIX vs standard unix

[System Admin Mike Peterson]

In article <8191 at awdprime.UUCP> dls at dce.austin.ibm.com writes:
>In article <11640 at ncar.ucar.edu>, pack at acd.uucp (Daniel Packman) writes:
>> Some of the differences in AIX seem perverse (eg, why not spell it f77
>> instead of xlf?)
>
>It's important to note that xlf is NOT f77; that's not a mere spelling
>difference, the name change was justified.

Gratuitous changes like this cause havoc for users, and for sysadmins
trying to figure out how to make it work in a reasonable way, especially
for packages that include (possibly nested) Makefiles. I assume by "f77"
you mean the BSD f77 - most other vendors (HP/Apollo and SGI to quote
systems we have here) call their compiler f77 even though it has
no connection with BSD f77. Why do you allow your "xlc" C compiler to be
called as "cc" - is it really related to the original "cc", or is it
because compatability with the world is a good thing?
-- 
Mike Peterson, System Administrator, U/Toronto Department of Chemistry
E-mail: system at alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca
Tel: (416) 978-7094                  Fax: (416) 978-8775