[TUHS] pre-more pager?

[Norman Wilson]

Random832:

  ... and "p" (which is very minimalistic, despite using a few
  V8-specific library features, but V8 isn't in the web-accessible source
  archive) from Version 8 research unix.

====

p actually originated outside Bell Labs.  I think it was
written in the late 1970s at the University of Toronto.

I first saw it at Caltech, on the UNIX systems in the
High Energy Physics group that I ran for four years.
The first few of those systems were set up by Rob Pike,
who was at Caltech working on his masters degree (in
astrophysics, I think); p was there because Rob brought
it.

For those who don't know it, p has quite an elegant
design.  Its default page size is 22 lines, which
nicely fit the world of its time: allowed a couple
of lines of context between pages on a 24-line CRT;
evenly divided the 66-line pages (still!) output
by nroff and pr.  It uttered no prompt and required
neither raw nor cbreak nor even no-echo mode: it
printed the final line of each page sans newline;
to continue, you typed return, which was echoed,
completing that line before the next was printed.
It buffered text internally to allow backing up a few
pages, so it was possible to back up even when input
didn't come from a file (something I'm not sure the
more of the time could do).

Internally the buffering was done with a standalone
library that could have been used in other programs,
though I don't know whether it ever was.

p also led me to an enlightening programming story.
One day I was looking over the code, trying to understand
just how the buffering worked; part of it made no sense
to me.  To figure it out, I decided to write my own
simple, straightforward version with the same interface;
test and debug it carefully; then lay printouts of the
two implementations side-by-side, and walk through some
test cases.  This revealed that the clever code I couldn't
make out in the original was actually buggy: it scrambled
data (I forget the details) when read returned less than
a full buffer.

p (my version) is one of the several programs I bring along
to every new UNIX-derivative environment.  I use it daily.
I have also recently noticed a new bug: on OpenBSD, it
sometimes scrambles the last few lines of a file.  I have
figured out that that has something to do with whether
fclose (my version uses stdio) is called explicitly or
by exit(3), but I don't know yet whether it's the library's
fault or my own.

Even the simplest programs have things to teach us.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON