Re: GNU Thunder

[Ian Grant]

On 8/30/14, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Are you saying that someone could have put a Ritchie hack
> into the proprietary compilers [...]

Perhaps you know more about the origins of the hack than I do, I was
going to call it a Schell script.

> [...] that would detect the code
> that GCC was going to have -- even though GCC kept changing?

It's surprisingly hard to fundamentally change a program that big.
Most changes are fairly minor and leave the basic structure unchanged.
So a trap door could look at the large-scale structure using
unification to do pattern matching, Then it would be able to adapt
automatically to many localised changes.

> We can't prove it did  not happen, but it would have been hard
> for them to keep up with us.

But "they" have all the source so they know exactly what they're attacking..

Ian