(For those who know how, sorry. This gave me a real headache and I couldn't find any useful info on it, so now that I got somewhere, I figured I'd mention it aloud...)
I was trying to get Unix-y stuff working (maybe something better than twm to do my cs homework with) but *nothing* wants to compile with cc. It's all looking for g++, or gcc (and calling cc "gcc" just gets compiler errors).
Turns out, "cc - traditional-cpp" is very much like g++. Sticking that in makefiles or doing "setenv CC "cc -traditional-cpp" before ./configure worked really well. Hurrah.
-Mniot