[TUHS] Another odd comment in V6

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2017, at 09:14, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > Without the proper design of the system call interface, this can be hard
> - how
> > does the system distinguish between the _first_ attempt at a system call
> (in
> > which the 'already done' count is 0), and a _later_ attempt? If the user
> passes
> > in the 'already done' count, it's pretty straightforward - otherwise,
> not so
> > much!
>
> You could return the address of the last character read, and let the
> user code do the math.
>
> I'm a bit confused though from a practical point of view where this
> comes up. If the terminal is in raw/cbreak mode, the user code must
> handle a "partial" read anyway, so returning five bytes is fine. If it's
> in canonical mode, the system call does not copy characters into the
> user buffer until they have pressed enter. Maybe there's some other case
> other than reading from a terminal that it makes sense for, but I
> couldn't think of any while writing this post.
>

Reading is sort of a bad example; the mechanism shines much more brightly
when one considers the write case.

Consider typing a file out to a (slow - recall these systems were designed
in the 70s when 300 BAUD terminals were considered fast and 1200 was
downright zippy) terminal device. The user may interrupt and suspend the
file-printing program in order to do something else for a time, and then
want to resume output where it left off. The beauty of the ITS PCLSR
mechanism is that it handles this case transparently: the system backs up
the PC and adjusts the system call arguments so that when the program is
resumed it automatically re-invokes the system call such that it continues
printing where it left off, with no need for the application to care.

An aside: The Gabriel papers elaborated on this, discussing the tradeoff
between the Unix approach and ITS and suggesting that the Unix approach has
better survivability characteristics. It's easier to get the Unix mechanism
"right", whereas ITS's implementation took many pages of assembly language
code (I recall him having a quip along the lines of, "and it probably isn't
all right").

One of the interesting things about Gabriel's writing is that he
acknowledges that the definition of "correct" varies and is subjective and
takes into account a good deal of taste and other "soft" characteristics.
The MIT folks who worked on ITS preferred their approach because they saw
it as being more obviously "correct", while the Unix folks felt the same
way, despite the obvious differences between the two.

        - Dan C.
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