It was thus said that the Great der Mouse once stated:
Not very far. [...gcc example...]
gcc (a) is a driver wrapper and (b) has options (which you conveniently
didn't mention) to explicitly specify what kind of input and output you
want it to work with, overriding the defaults (which are based on file
names).
I actually didn't realize that when I did the example. I guess that's
what I get for sticking with C for the most part.
-spc (Still learning stuff about Unix even after 16 years ... )