Z:gnu-www-ja-byte-interview--74680c-=3Cstrong=3EStallman=3C/strong=3E: The/en

Stallman : The C compiler will produce better code and run faster. The debugger is better. With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve it. But there is no one answer to this question. To some extent I am getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on many other systems. I therefore have many ideas to bring to bear. One way in which it will be better is that practically everything in the system will work on files of any size, on lines of any size, with any characters appearing in them. The Unix system is very bad in that regard. It's not anything new as a principle of software engineering that you shouldn't have arbitrary limits. But it just was the standard practice in writing Unix to put those in all the time, possibly just because they were writing it for a very small computer. The only limit in the GNU system is when your program runs out of memory because it tried to work on too much data and there is no place to keep it all.