[TUHS] Algol 68 and Unix (was cron and at ...)
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Dec 18 00:35:58 AEST 2020
On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 09:24:47AM -0500, Ronald Natalie wrote:
>
>
> > On Dec 17, 2020, at 9:21 AM, M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> >
> > shell, including the story of do...done, has often been told. It
> > shows up most vividly in the condition part of if and while
> > statements.
>
> I was never so happy as when SVR2 came out and found that someone had ???translated??? the shell source code back into C.
I sort of agree. The macro-ed ALGOL like syntax that Steve did was hard
to deal with if you weren't on the ALGOL train (I was not, too young).
So the C version was easier for me to understand. But it sort of
lost something, I didn't really understand Steve's version, not at any
deep level. But it made more sense, somehow, than the C version did.
--lm
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