>In short, for many programs there is not much of a difference. Sadly,
>some programs are especially stupid, and one exacmple of this is "as", if
>I remember correctly. At least some versions of the GNU assembler did a
>"write()" system call for every instruction, so you ended up with _huge_
>amounts of NFS packets.
Just for the record, this is not true of current versions of the GNU
assembler. The GNU assembler has used stdio for quite a while now.
Ian