You could, for instance, run this development environment on your sun4 to build our example desk calculator program. You could then run the desk calculator program on your sun4. The resulting desk calculator program is referred to as a native program. The development environment itself is composed of native programs that, when run, build other native programs. Any other program is referred to as foreign .
Programs intended for other machines are foreign programs.
This type of development environment, which is by far the most common, is refered to as native . That is, a native development environment runs on some machine to build programs for that same machine. The process of using a native development environment to build native programs is called a native build. The development system that came with your sun4 is one such environment. Using it to build the GNU Development Tools is a very common activity and the resulting development environment is quite popular.