Yes. If it was =op, this means the C program probably used =+ instead of +=. That was the
dialect of C that was around when Al was at Bell Labs. The transition from =+ to += was a
pain, but decreased errors dramatically (a=-1 vs a= -1).
We actually had a pretty good system for making changes like that. First, we would change
the compiler to accept both the old and the new. Then we would produce a warning
that on a particular date the old would no longer work. Then we made the old an error
and printed a message about how to fix it. Eventually, we just let it be a syntax error.
This process was applied many times on the way from typeless B to strongly typed C.
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Lars Brinkhoff" <lars@nocrew.org>
To:
"Steve Johnson" <scj@yaccman.com>
Cc:
<tuhs@tuhs.org>
Sent:
Mon, 29 Oct 2018 07:31:24 +0000
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] Archaic yacc C grammar
Steve Johnson wrote:
> Looking at the reserved words, there is one, ENTRY, that I've never
> heard of (although FORTRAN had an ENTRY statement), and there is
> STRUCT but no UNION. Also, he uses val= instead of $$=. There don't
> seem to be any nontrivial assignment ops (neither += or =+).
This is for Snyder's C compiler. There is something called =op which
is guess is for =+ etc.
> I'm guessing either Al wrote it from scratch or based it on some other
> similar program.
Looks like you're right. I found this in another file, so it would seem
he wrote it back at MIT:
"The original YACC was designed and implemented on a PDP-11/45 and a
Honeywell 6000 by S. C. Johnson at Bell Laboratories. The version
described in this paper was implemented on the PDP-10 by Alan Snyder.