[TUHS] Early Yacc revisited

Mark Longridge cubexyz at gmail.com
Wed Nov 12 00:21:57 AEST 2014


I've been thinking more about early yacc.

It's not mentioned explicitly but I'm wondering if early Yacc's output
(say in Unix version 3) was in B language since it was written in B
language? It seems logical but I can't back up this assertion as
there's no executable or source code that I can find. I assume there
had to be some sort of B language compiler at some point but the
hybrid v1/v2 unix I've looked at doesn't have it.

And I'm still wondering what yacc was used for in the Unix v5 era.
There's no *.y at all, e.g. no expr and no bc. I still have some hopes
of modifying bc to run on Unix v5, or at least getting some simple
yacc program to work under the v5 version.

Mark



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