1 Dec
2018
1 Dec
'18
11:09 p.m.
I wrote (re my approach to sendmail.cf):
Bill's half right. I didn't invent a
language; I used what was there.
Grant Taylor asked:
Can I ask what language you did use? Was it m4 or something else?
====
I think you missed my point. The language I used was plain old
sendmail.cf.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
2 Dec
2 Dec
2:37 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On 12/1/18 4:09 PM, Norman Wilson wrote:
I think you missed my point. The language I used was
plain old
sendmail.cf.
Sorry, I mistook the context to be that you wrote something to write the
cf file / language for you.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
2:44 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Sat, Dec 01, 2018 at 07:37:20PM -0700, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
On 12/1/18 4:09 PM, Norman Wilson wrote:
I'm kinda with Grant on this one. Maybe I misunderstood but what I thought
you did was treat the sendmail.cf as assembler for a weird processor and
then you wrote a higher level language that compiled down to sendmail.cf.
Which, if that's that you did, is pretty studly. I think Grant was asking
what you did the higher level language in, he was wondering if it was m4
(which I doubt, if I were doing that it would either be some nasty perl
script that I thought was going to be small but wasn't, or I'd just go
to lex/yacc/C).
I think you missed my point. The language I used
was plain old
sendmail.cf.
Sorry, I mistook the context to be that you wrote something to write the cf
file / language for you.
2:59 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On 12/1/18 7:44 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
I'm kinda with Grant on this one. Maybe I
misunderstood but what I
thought you did was treat the sendmail.cf as assembler for a weird
processor and then you wrote a higher level language that compiled
down to sendmail.cf. Which, if that's that you did, is pretty studly.
I think Grant was asking what you did the higher level language in,
he was wondering if it was m4
Yep, that's what I was my interpretation and my question.
(which I doubt, if I were doing that it would either
be some nasty perl
script that I thought was going to be small but wasn't, or I'd just go
to lex/yacc/C).
One of these days I should find out the genesis of the m4 (.mc) file
syntax that is used to generate the .cf file.
I'm curious why m4 was chosen over other languages. I wonder what the
other language options were.
I know that I learned m4 because of Sendmail's .mc file. I've since
started using m4 for a number of other things.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
3 Dec
3 Dec
1:05 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 3:31 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
Blind, write-only programming at its finest. Trial and error until you
think there's no more error. Think.
Warner
I think you missed my point. The language I used
was plain old
sendmail.cf.
And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.
4 Dec
4 Dec
7:48 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Warner Losh wrote:
And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf
(shudder!) is not a
programmer.
Blind, write-only programming at its finest. Trial and error until you
think there's no more error. Think.
I can only say one thing: APL\360... Now, *there* was a write-only
language.
Oh, the stories that I could tell.
-- Dave
3:08 p.m.
New subject: APL - was Re: man-page style
On 2018-12-04 2:48 AM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Warner Losh wrote:
For a more positive take on APL -- only for the open-minded -- try watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCJ3BCIudI
And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf
(shudder!) is not a
programmer.
Blind, write-only programming at its finest. Trial and error until you
think there's no more error. Think.
I can only say one thing: APL\360... Now, *there* was a write-only
language.
Oh, the stories that I could tell.
-- Dave
5:07 p.m.
New subject: APL - was Re: man-page style
On 04/12/2018, Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 2018-12-04 2:48 AM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
When I attended an UML course -- about a hundred years ago or so --
one of the attendees was from Reuters. He told us that they were
moving to C++ because they could not hire enough people to learn APL,
their preferred development language at the tim, even though willing
to teach them APL. He thought it far better suited to their task than
C++.
N.
I can only say one thing: APL\360... Now,
*there* was a write-only
language.
For a more positive take on APL -- only for the open-minded -- try
watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCJ3BCIudI
>
> Oh, the stories that I could tell.
-- Dave
5:55 p.m.
New subject: APL - was Re: man-page style
Regarding APL\360, I interned at IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center for
a few years before joining DEC in 1980. My first job there was to
write a link editor in S/360 assembler that would run stand-alone on
S/360 hardware (why I was doing this is an interesting story, but long
and way off-topic). This was to replace an existing link editor that
was written in APL\360. It was the largest APL program I've ever
seen--it ran for over 10 pages of solid code! It also ran slower than
death.
-Paul W.
6:55 p.m.
New subject: APL - was Re: man-page style
On 12/4/18 10:55 AM, Paul Winalski wrote:
why I was doing this is an interesting story, but long
and way off-topic
I'm always interested in odd stories like this.
Perhaps it would be more on topic on the COFF mailing list. ;-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
3 Dec
3 Dec
1:14 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Mon, 03 Dec 2018 09:30:06 +1100 Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Dave Horsfall writes:
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
:-)
In 1985 for a client I had to check if Sendmail's
implementation of SMTP met FIPS standard or some such (don't
ask -- I don't recall most of the details now). I got pretty
familiar with it. But ever since then I have not wanted to
use it. I switched to PostFix a long time ago but that too has
become rather complicated.
I think you missed my point. The language I used
was plain old
sendmail.cf.
And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.
1:30 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Sun, Dec 02, 2018 at 05:14:07PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
On Mon, 03 Dec 2018 09:30:06 +1100 Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Dave Horsfall writes:
> On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
> > I think you missed my point. The language I used was plain old
> > sendmail.cf.
>
> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood,
swtch(), you are not a systems guy.
But I don't think we should judge each other, we should admire those
amongst us who have taken the time to understand something deeply.
Doesn't really matter if it is the kernel (though that's where I like it)
or sendmail.cf (I gotta give credit to those that get that), it is all
about deep understanding.
If you did that much work and got it, welcome to the club. It's kind
of a shitty club because nobody gets what you do so nobody values it,
but some of us do.
4 Dec
4 Dec
9:26 p.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
Ahh, line 2238...
-- Dave
> And anyone
who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
> programmer.
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood,
swtch(), you are not a systems guy.
9:34 p.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 08:26:29AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
Ahh, line 2238...
I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?
I learned swtch() because I wrote a userland thread library for Udi Manber
as a grad student (yield based as I recall). I'd never really thought
about it hard, yeah, did all the CS toy OS stuff but I don't think they
made us write that. I loved writing it, I did a super minimal one that
had the bulk of the work in C, just did the save/restore in asm.
It's just so satisying to go in as one process and come out as the
other (and annoying when some idiot used floating point - who does
that? Cough, Clem, cough. and you realize you didn't save/restore
fp registers :)
>And
anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
>programmer.
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, swtch(),
you are not a systems guy.
10:11 p.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Dec 4, 2018, at 1:34 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 08:26:29AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
I too built a coroutine library. We used it for simulating
some real h/w we were building. The nice thing about h/w
simulation is no recursion so your threads can work with as
little as 50-100 bytes of stack, so even on a 64MB machine 100K
threads was not a problem! There is no yield() here being a
simulation core. Thread switch occurs in wait(), signal() &
busy(n) -- the last one to simulate passage of time. I built
the very initial version in 1982-83 using setjmp/longjmp! We
used it to check if our 5.6Mhz bus could support ethernet
traffic while doing other things.
Of course, this is much simpler than a unix swtch().
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
Ahh, line 2238...
I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?
I learned swtch() because I wrote a userland thread library for Udi Manber
as a grad student (yield based as I recall). I'd never really thought
about it hard, yeah, did all the CS toy OS stuff but I don't think they
made us write that. I loved writing it, I did a super minimal one that
had the bulk of the work in C, just did the save/restore in asm. > And
anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
> programmer.
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, swtch(),
you are not a systems guy. 
5 Dec
5 Dec
6:50 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Tue, Dec 04, 2018 at 01:34:52PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 08:26:29AM +1100, Dave Horsfall
wrote:
"You are not expected..."
Pierre
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
Ahh, line 2238...
I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?
>And
anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
>programmer.
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, swtch(),
you are not a systems guy.
28 Dec
28 Dec
6:32 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
On Tue, 4 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?
Yep.
-- Dave
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or
understood, swtch(),
you are not a systems guy.
Ahh, line 2238... 
4 Dec
4 Dec
10:54 p.m.
New subject: swtch() (was: man-page style)
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 8:26:29 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
Ahh, line 2238...
Not line 325 of ken/slp.c?
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
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> And
anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
> programmer.
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood,
swtch(), you are not a systems guy. 
5 Dec
5 Dec
3:33 p.m.
New subject: swtch() (was: man-page style)
Same thing... it's line 2238 in Lions' numbering system on sheet 22 of
the sources book. It's line 325 of ken/slp.c if you are in ed/vi or the
like.
ᐧ
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 5:55 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 8:26:29 +1100, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
Ahh, line 2238...
Not line 325 of ken/slp.c?
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
> And
anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
> programmer.
As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood,
swtch(), you are not a systems guy.
30 Dec
30 Dec
7:05 p.m.
New subject: swtch() (was: man-page style)
On 12/28/18, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
The Lions book. "You are not expected to understand this".
There was a similar comment in the sources for the VAX/VMS debugger's
primary interrupt dispatcher (which was written in assembler):
"WARNING: If you think you understand this code, you're wrong."
-Paul W.
3 Dec
3 Dec
6:53 a.m.
New subject: man-page style
Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
Now you're just starting a pissing contest.
I think you missed my point. The language I used
was plain old
sendmail.cf.
And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.
-- Dave
1943
days inactive
1972
days old
22 comments
13 participants
participants (13)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Bakul Shah -
Clem Cole -
Dave Horsfall -
Grant Taylor -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
Larry McVoy -
Nemo -
Norman Wilson -
Paul Winalski -
Pierre DAVID -
Toby Thain -
Warner Losh