[TUHS] Ratfor revived!

[Clem Cole]

Arnold -- sounds fun.  Thank you!!!  I'll add it to my growing pile of
things I want to play with at some point.   I too had a wonderful childhood
experience with the SW tools.  Somebody had a number of them running on a
VMS box when all we had was the VMS Fortran compiler, no C yet.

I am curious why did you decide to use byacc?   I would have thought in a
desire to modernize and make it more available on a modern system -- was
there something in byacc that could not be done easily in bison?   To be
honest, I had thought Robert Corbett did them both and bison was the
successor to byacc, but I'm not a compiler guy - so I'm suspecting that
there must be a difference/reason.   As I said, this is purely curiosity --
an educational opportunity.

Thanks again,
Clem
ᐧ

On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 3:41 PM Arnold Robbins <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> Hi All.
>
> Mainly for fun (sic), I decided to revive the Ratfor (Rational
> Fortran) preprocessor.  Please see:
>
>         https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/ratfor
>
> I started with the V6 code, then added the V7, V8 and V10 versions
> on top of it. Each one has its own branch so that you can look
> at the original code, if you wish. The man page and the paper from
> the V7 manual are also included.
>
> Starting with the Tenth Edition version, I set about to modernize
> the code and get it to compile and run on a modern-day system.
> (ANSI style declarations and function headers, modern include files,
> use of getopt, and most importantly, correct use of Yacc yyval and
> yylval variables.)
>
> You will need Berkely Yacc installed as byacc in order to build it.
>
> I have only touch-tested it, but so far it seems OK.  'make' runs in like 2
> seconds, really quick. On my Ubuntu Linux systems, it compiles with
> no warnings.
>
> I hope to eventually add a test suite also, if I can steal some time.
>
> Before anyone asks, no, I don't think anybody today has any real use
> for it.  This was simply "for fun", and because Ratfor has a soft
> spot in my heart.  "Software Tools" was, for me, the most influential
> programming book that I ever read.  I don't think there's a better
> book to convey the "zen" of Unix.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
>
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