TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6496 discussions

by G. Branden Robinson

At 2023-06-16T14:22:22+1000, Damian McGuckin wrote: > On Thu, 15 Jun 2023, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > But I may suffer from an excessive familiarity with this material. > > Yes. Me too. Maybe that is a sad comment on the both of us. That is the price of trying to leave things better than one found them. > Why do Greeks have an alternate way of writing sigma! We English-speakers used to have an alternative way of writing it, if you regard the Latin alphabet's "S" as cognate (so to speak) with the Greek sigma (and I think doing so is defensible). It's even in Unicode with a low code point, U+017F. For inſtance, the United States uſed to employ a non-final lowercaſe S in the founding documents of its preſent government, where you can see exhibits of the "Congreſs of the United States". It can take the modern reader a "long S" time to not read that "s" as an "f". And if you think that's difficult enough, check out, IIRC, the Arabic and Devanagari scripts where you can have different initial, medial, and final forms for letters. Follow-ups ſhould probably be confined to groff@; I'll ſtop now leſt we get ſent to the COFF liſt for groſs tranſgreſſions of topicality. (Although if anyone wants to tell me whether non-final s was applied to the trailing ends of non-final morphemes _within_ words, I'm all ears.) Regards, Branden

1 year, 11 months

Re: GNU eqn clarifications and reforms

by Douglas McIlroy

I am not convinced that using special characters rather than in-line eqn is a good thing. It means learning a whole new vocabulary. Quick, what's the special character for Greek psi? I have found that, for a sequence of displayed equations as in an algebraic derivation, a pile often looks more coherent than a sequence of EQ-EN pairs. The pile can even contain interleaved comments, as in Hoare-style proofs. Doug

1 year, 11 months

Re: [COFF] Re: Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?

by Adam Thornton

On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 9:29 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > VMS (officially OpenVMS; I hated that marketing name when it was first > proposed and I hate it now) is still alive and supported by a company > called VMS Software, Inc. (VSI). Here is a pointer to their document > OpenVMS Programming Concepts, Volume II, which describes the CLE in > detail: > > I think it's worth mentioning that the OpenVMS Hobbyist Program is still alive and well and recently began supplying x86_64 licenses to hobbyists, so if you have a reasonably modern amd64 system, you can run it under QEMU.

1 year, 11 months

crt0 -- what's in that name?

by ron minnich

This came up lately in the riscv firmware universe. Someone named early boot bt0, I mentioned crt0, and ... when did that name first appear? I first saw it in v6 but I'm sure it was long before.

1 year, 11 months

Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?

by Douglas McIlroy

> Not a citation, either, but I believe the original RUNCOM came from CTSS (https://multicians.org/shell.html) Yes, the CTSS command "runcom" arranged for commands stored in a file to be run in the background. Such a file (which could contain at most six commands) became known as "a runcom". The term "script" did not emerge until Unix. I vaguely recall that Lee McMahon coined the usage, but would welcome more reliable info about its origin. Doug

1 year, 11 months

Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?

by Rudi Blom

Maybe not really 'defining' but useful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crt0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.bss -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

1 year, 11 months

Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?

by norman＠oclsc.org

Clem Cole: > Apologies to TUHS - other than please don't think Fortran did not > impact UNIX and its peers. Fortran had an important (if indirect) influence in early Unix. From Dennis's memories of the early days of Unix on the PDP-7: Soon after TMG became available, Thompson decided that we could not pretend to offer a real computing service without Fortran, so he sat down to write a Fortran in TMG. As I recall, the intent to handle Fortran lasted about a week. What he produced instead was a definition of and a compiler for the new language B. (The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System; see the 1984 UNIX System issue of the BLTJ for the whole thing, or just read https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html) Now let's move on to the name `rc'. Not the shell, but the usage as part of a file name. Those two characters appear at the end of the many annoying, and mostly pointless, configuration files that litter one's home directory these days, apparently copied from the old system-startup script /etc/rc as if the name means `startup commands' (or something beginning with r, I suppose, instead of startup). But I recall reading somewhere that it just stood for `runcom,' a Multics-derived term for what we now call a shell script. I can't find a citation to back up that claim, though. Anyone else remember where to look? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 year, 11 months

Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?

by Douglas McIlroy

>I thought it was pretty well known that it [BSS] stands for, "Block Started (by) Symbol"? BSS was a "pseudo-operation" in SAP (SHARE assembly program) for the IBM 704. My recollection is that the assembler manual called it "block starting at symbol". There was also a BES (block ending at symbol) pseudo-op. Both reserved a block of memory, with the assembler assigning the appropriate value to the pseudo-op's label. The reason for BES was that index registers were subtractive. There was a loop-ending instruction ,TIX (transfer on index), that decreased the index by a specified amount and transferred to a specified location unless the index hit zero, in which case the instruction counter continued in sequence. BES was originally conceived for addressing an array stored by increasing subscript but indexed by a register that counted down. BES was also useful for FORTRAN object code, which stored arrays backward and kept the true, uncomplemented subscript in an index register. Doug

1 year, 11 months

Re How should I define 'thing' before I start talking about it?

by Douglas McIlroy

Mea culpa. eqn does recognize groff escapes outside of quotes. Doug

1 year, 11 months

Re: How should I define 'thing' before I start talking about it?

by Douglas McIlroy

> As far as I see it, EQN input is made of things where a thing is one of > mathematical or troff or eqn symbol > mathematical punctuation > delimiter, these being space, '~', '^', '{', '}', or newline > a character surrounded by punctuation or delimiters > - with/without users errors > a word surrounded by punctuation or delimiters > - with/without users errors > EQN keywords (which are special words???) > That is way too long winded!! I want something tight. Quotes take precedence over all other things. What is a "troff symbol"? I can only think of troff escapes, which can only appear in quotes , so are not eqn things in their own right. (In user errors they may be seen as punctuation, etc.) Ditto for "eqn symbol"? Perhaps the union of some or all of the things that follow in the list? Ditto again for "mathematical punctuation". Comma is one example I can think of. Apostrophe, read as "prime", may be another. Are there more? Is "surrounded by" inclusive or exclusive? Why is "character" distinguished from "word"? The ??? question bears on the issue of whether sintheta is one thing or two. The word "maximal" will probably figure in the answer Another (sticky) point is how punctuation sticks to an adjacent thing. For example, eqn inserts space in (a,b), but keeps the whole thing(?) together in 2 sup (a,b). Doug

1 year, 11 months

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