better alternatives fast approaching

Oh, and the code is a good bit less ugly nowadays. You might want to look 
into developments in GCC in the last eight years or so. It's not been 
static by any means. (The whole plugin discussion has been triggered in 
part because inter-module optimizations require the writing out of a lot 
of GCC internal state anyway, in some form, and RMS has okayed this. He's 
not totally inflexible, you see, although it is true that in this area he 
*has* probably been too inflexible.)