Why would anyone be smoking with their compiler not set up?

[Martin J. Evans]

Perhaps I am misreading 
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2009/01/msg3090019.html 
but it looks as if the C compiler is not set up properly. Why would 
anyone be smoking and attempting to build XS modules without their C 
compiler being set up. May be this is some other issue. Any ideas?

Martin