OP here, all my C courses had the extra requirement that they compile under GCC on a Solaris box; not for our education but for the prof's benefit of using an a

OP here, all my C courses had the extra requirement that they compile under GCC on a Solaris box; not for our education but for the prof's benefit of using an automated "turnin" program for grading. Thank god though, I had one cool professor that let me use Visual C++ while everyone else used GCC. The productivity boost allowed me to beat everyone in getting the regular projects done and then give me extra time to code up extra credit stuff. Not a language progression but a tool progression at least - got me hooked on IDE's.