Hello All.
Believed lost in the mists of time for over 30 years, the Georgia Tech
Software Tools Subsystem for Prime Computers, along with the Georgia Tech
C Compiler for Prime Computers, have been recovered!
The source code and documentation (and binary files) are available in a
Github repo: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/gt-swt.
The README.md there provides some brief history and credits with respect
to the recovery, and w.r.t. the subsystem and C compilers themselves.
Credit to Scott Lee for making and keeping the tapes and driving the
recovery process, and to Dennis Boone and yours truly for contributing
financially. I set up the repo.
For anyone who used and/or contributed to this software, we hope you'll
enjoy this trip down memory lane.
Feel free to forward this note to interested parties.
Enjoy,
Arnold Robbins
(On behalf of the swt recovery team. :-)
Hello All.
I have revived the 10th edition spell(1) program, allowing it to compile
and run on "modern" systems.
See https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/v10spell ; the README.md gives
an overview of what was done.
Enjoy!
Arnold
Greetings!
As a project for our university's seminar on the PDP-8 I wrote a
compiler for the B language targeting it. It's a bit rough around
the edges and the runtime code needs some work (division and
remainder are missing), but it does compile B code correctly,
generating acceptable code (for my taste, though the function call
sequence could be better).
I hope some of you enjoy this compiler for an important historical
language for an important historical computer (makes me wonder why
the two weren't married before).
https://github.com/fuzxxl/8bc
Yours,
Robert Clausecker
--
() ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world
/\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments
https://2019.eurobsdcon.org/livestream-soria-moria/
Has a live stream. My talk is at 1230 UTC or just under 2 hours. There will
be a recording I think that I'll be able to share with you in a day or
three.
Warner
Hi!
Is there a public OpenSolaris Git/CVS/SVN ?
The openloaris.org site is down.
AFIK the first sources set (not complete) was published around June 2005.
The latest available sources were b135 March 2010
(available at TUHS)
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135
It would be interesting to see an evolution of "pure" SysV R4.
--
-=AV=-
Larry McVoy:
If you have something like perl that needs a zillion sub pages, info
makes sense. For just a man page, info is horrible.
=====
This pokes me in one of my longest-standing complaints:
Manual entries, as printed by man and once upon a time in
the Programmers' Manual Volume 1, should be concise references.
They are not a place for tutorials or long-winded descriptions
or even long lists of hundreds of options (let alone descriptions
of why the developer thinks this is the neatest thing since
sliced bread and what bread he had in his sandwiches that day).
For many programs, one or two pages of concise reference is
all the documentation that's needed; no one needs a ten-page
tutorial on how to use cat or rm or ls, for example. But some
programs really do deserve a longer treatment, either a tutorial
or an extended reference with more detail or both. Those belong
in separate documents, and are why the Programmers' Manual had
a second volume.
Nowadays people think nothing of writing 68-page-long manual
entries (real example from something I'm working with right now)
that are long, chatty lists of options or configuration-file
directives with tutorial information interspersed. The result
makes the developer feel good--look at all the documentation
I've written!!--but it's useless for someone trying to figure
out how to write a configuration file for the first time, and
not so great even for someone trying to edit an existing one.
Even the Research system didn't always get this right; some
manual entries ran on and on and on when what was really
needed was a concise list of something and a longer accompanying
document. (The Tenth Edition manual was much better about
that, mostly because of all the work Doug put in. I doubt
there has ever been a better editor for technical text than
Doug.) But it's far worse now in most systems, because
there's rarely any editor at all; the manuals are just an
accreted clump.
And that's a shame, though I have no suggestions on how
to fix it.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Clem Cole:
Exactly!!!! That's what Eric did when he wrote more(ucb) - he *added to
Unix*. The funny part was that USG thought more(ucb) was a good idea and
then wrote their own, pg(att); which was just as arrogant as the info
behavior from the Gnu folks!!!
======
And others wrote their own too, of course. The one I know
best is p(1), written by Rob Pike in the late 1970s at the
University of Toronto. I encountered at Caltech on the
system Rob had set up before leaving for Bell Labs (and
which I cared for and hacked on for the next four years
before following him). By the time I reached BTL it was
a normal part of the Research system; I believe it's in
all of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Edition manuals.
p is interesting because it's so much lighter-weight, and
because it has rather a different interior design:
Rather than doing termcappy things, p just prints 22 lines
(or the number specified in an option), then doesn't print
the newline after the 22nd line. Hit return and it will
print the next 22 lines, and so on. The resulting text just
flows up the glass-tty screen without any fuss, cbreak, or
anything. (I believe the first version predated V7 and
therefore cbreak.)
Why 22 lines instead of 24, the common height of glass ttys
back then? Partly because that means you keep a line or two
of context when advancing pages, making reading simpler.
But also because in those days, a standard page destined for
a printer (e.g. from pr or nroff, and therefore from man) was
66 lines long. 22 evenly divides 66, so man something | p
never gives you a screen spanning pages.
p was able to back up: type - (and return) instead of just
return, and it reprints the previous 22-line page; -- (return)
the 22 lines before that; and so on. This was implemented
in an interesting and clever way: a wrapper around the standard
I/O library which kept a circular buffer of some fixed number
of characters (8KiB in early versions, I think), and a new
call that, in effect, backed up the file pointer by one character
and returned the character just backed over. That made it easy
to back over the previous N lines: just make that call until
you've seen N newlines, then discard the newline you've just
backed over, and you're at the beginning the first line you want
to reprint.
As I vaguely recall, more was able to back up, but only when
reading from a real file, not a pipeline. p could do (limited
but sufficient) backup from a pipeline too.
As a creature of its pre-window-system era, you could also type
!command when p paused as well.
I remember being quite interested in that wrapper as a
possible library for use in other things, though I never
found a use for it.
I also remember a wonderful Elements-of-Programming-Style
adventure with Rob's code. I discovered it had a bug under some
specific case when read returned less than a full bufferful.
I read the code carefully and couldn't see what was wrong.
So I wrote my own replacement for the problematic subroutine
from scratch, tested it carefully in corner cases, then with
listings of Rob's code and mine side-by-side walked through
each with the problem case and found the bug.
I still carry my own version of p (rewritten from scratch mainly
to make it more portable--Rob's code was old enough to be too
clever in some details) wherever I go; ironically, even back to
U of T where I have been on and off for the past 30 years.
more and less and pg and the like are certainly useful programs;
for various reasons they're not to my taste, but I don't scorn
them. But I can't help being particular fond of p because it
taught me a few things about programming too.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
KatolaZ:
> We can discuss whether the split was necessary or "right" in the first
> instance, as we could discuss whether it was good or not for cat(1) to
> leave Murray Hill in 1979 with no options and come back from Berkley
> with a source code doubled in size and 9 options in 1982.
We needn't discuss that (though of course there are opinions and
mine are the correct ones), but in the interest of historic accuracy,
I should point out by 1979 (V7) cat had developed a single option -u
to turn off stdio buffering.
Sometime before 1984 or so, that option was removed, and cat was
simplified to just
while ((n = read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf))) > 0)
write(1, buf, n)
(error checking elided for clarity)
which worked just fine for the rest of the life of the Research
system.
So it's true that BSD added needless (in my humble but correct
opinion) options, but not that it had none before they touched it.
Unless all those other programs were stuffed into cat in an earlier
Berkeley system, but I don't think they were.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Three cats, no options)
Arthur Krewat:
Which is better, creating a whole new binary to put in /usr/bin to do a
single task, or add a flag to cat?
Which is better, a proliferation of binaries w/standalone source code,
or a single code tree that can handle slightly different tasks and save
space?
======
Which is simpler to write correctly, to debug, and to maintain:
a simple program that does a single task, or a huge single program
with lots of tasks mashed together?
Which is easier to understand and use, individual programs each
with a few options specialized to a particular task, or a monolith
with many more options some of which apply only to one task or
another, others to all?
What are you trying to optimize for? The speed with which
programmers can churn out yet another featureful utility full
of bugs and corner cases, or the ease with which the end-user
can figure out what tool to use and how to use it?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
