[TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h

[Steve Johnson]

Don't have much to add except to note that early FORTRANs had a
version of IF that took three statement numbers and did a (gasp) GOTO
to the first if the expression in the IF was negative, to the second
if it was 0, and to the third if it was positive.   And some
mainframes had an instruction that did exactly that as well...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug McIlroy" <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
To:<tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Sat, 12 Aug 2017 21:58:19 -0400
Subject:[TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h

 Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> asked this question (not on tuhs).
 It highlights some less well known contributors to research Unix.

 > I'm trying to find out who came up with strcmp and the idea of
 > returning -1,0,1 for a string comparison. I can see that it's not
in
 > my V6 manual but is in V7. Don't see anything in Algol, PL/I, BCPL,
or B

 The -1,0,1 return from comparisons stems from the interface of qsort,
 which was written by Lee McMahon. As far as I know, the interface for
 the comparison-function parameter originated with him, but
conceivably
 he borrowed it from some other sort utility. The
negative-zero-positive
 convention for the return value encouraged (and perhaps was motivated
by)
 this trivial comparison function for integers
 int compar(a,b) { return(a-b); }
 This screws up on overflow, so cautious folks would write it with
 comparisons. And -1,0,1 were the easiest conventional values to
return:
 int compar(a,b) {
 if(a<b) return(-1);
 if(a>b) return(1);
 return(0);
 }
 qsort was in v2. In v3 a string-comparison routine called "compar"
 appeared, with a man page titled "string comparison for sort". So the
 convention was established early on.

 Compar provided the model for strcmp, one of a package of basic
string
 operations that came much later, in v7, under the banner of string.h
 and ctype.h.

 These packages were introduced at the urging of Nils-Peter Nelson, a
 good friend of the Unix lab, who was in the Bell Labs comp center.
 Here's the story in his own words.

 I wrote a memo to dmr with some suggestions for additions to C. I
asked
 for the str... because the mainframes had single instructions to
implement
 them. I know for sure I had a blindingly fast implementation of
isupper,
 ispunct, etc. I had a table of length 128 integers for the ascii
character
 set; I assigned bits for upper, lower, numeric, punct, control, etc.
So
 ispunct(c) became

 #define PUNCT 0400
 return(qtable[c]&PUNCT)
 instead of
 if(c==':' || c ==';' || ...
 [or
 switch(c) {
 default:
 return 0;
 case ':':
 case ';':
 ...
 return 1;
 }
 MDM]
 dmr argued people could easily write their own but when I showed
 him my qtable was 20 times faster he gave in. I also asked for type
 logical which dmr implemented as unsigned, which was especially
useful
 when bitfields were implemented (a 2 bit int would have values -2,
-1,
 0, 1 instead of 0, 1, 2, 3). I requested a way to interject
assembler,
 which became asm() (yes, a bad idea).

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