Help Compiling for mips-sgi-irix 6.2

I was trying to port tn5250-0.15.7 to run on our Indigo2 running IRIX
6.2 using GCC 2.8.1
and I ran into this problem while running the ./configure file.
Any help or suggestions making this port successful?

config.log file >
  This file contains any messages produced by compilers while
  running configure, to aid debugging if configure makes a mistake.

  configure:578: checking for a BSD compatible install
  configure:631: checking whether build environment is sane
  configure:688: checking whether make sets ${MAKE}
  configure:735: checking for working aclocal
  configure:748: checking for working autoconf
  configure:761: checking for working automake
  configure:774: checking for working autoheader
  configure:787: checking for working makeinfo
  configure:820: checking for gcc
  configure:933: checking whether the C compiler (gcc  ) works
  configure:949: gcc -o conftest    conftest.c  1>&5
  gcc: installation problem, cannot exec `as': No such file or directory
  configure: failed program was:

  #line 944 "configure"
  #include "confdefs.h"

  main(){return(0);}
< end of config.log
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