That's right, It's all just stuff that happens when you hit F5 in your IDE. It's like not needing to know how an internal combustion engine works since all you have to do is tell the driver where you want to go.

Because it helps when the process breaks and you don't end up being helpless and unable to fix the most important tool you use at your work.

Being ignorant is cute until its your job to be an engineer and fix problems.

In the gcc/gas distinction, the fact that gas is part of binutils, a completely separate project from gcc, means that there is another package you might have to update to use a new feature.

The parent comment did say:

> is one of my favorite things to tell newbie compiler engineers.

Exactly. This is all implementation trivia that is of absolutely no concern to me as a user.