By 1990, Stallman had also generated
GNU versions of the Bourne Shell (rechristened the
Bourne Again Shell, or BASH), YACC (rechristened
Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk). Like GCC , every
GNU program had to be designed to run on multiple
systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the
process of making programs more flexible, Stallman and
his collaborators often made them more useful as well.
Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time
Freeware's Morin points to a critical, albeit mundane,
software package called hello. "It's the hello world
program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it
were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got
the Texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. It's got all
the other software engineering goo that the GNU Project
has come up with to allow packages to port to all these
different environments smoothly. That's tremendously
important work, and it affects not only all of
[Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU
Project software.
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