[TUHS] Ratfor revived!

[Henry Bent]

Thank you, Clem.  I am working on getting the tools running in DOSBox,
which seemed most straightforward.

The Byte article (the scan of which I am very grateful for; not having to
go trawling through the stacks at the Oberlin College library is always a
plus) claims that the tools have been implemented on:

ACOS
Amdahl
Apollo
AN/UYK
Burroughs
CDC
Cray
Data General
DEC
FACOM
GEC
HP
HITAC
Honeywell
IBM
Intel
Interdata
Modcomp
Multics
NCR
Perkin-Elmer
Prime
Rolm
SEL
Tandem
Univac
Wang
Xerox
CP/M Machines
MS/DOS Machines
UNIX Machines

Which is quite the list; I've never even heard of a few of those!  Based on
the files in the UNIX Archive, am I to assume that most of those ports took
advantage of a native Pascal compiler?  That's how I'm planning to bring
the tools up on my local RT-11 machine.

-Henry

On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 at 19:34, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Software_Tools/
> ᐧ
>
> On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 5:25 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 at 17:17, Deborah Scherrer <
>> dscherrer at solar.stanford.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> All you folks revisiting the Software Tools should remember that there
>>> was an entire movement around the first book, based at Lawrence Berkeley
>>> Lab.  The Software Tools group, an offshoot of Usenix, had about 2000
>>> members.  We created an almost-entire Unix environment based on a virtual
>>> operating system that we designed, inspired of course by Kernighan's
>>> ideas.  The collection was ported to over 50 operating systems, including
>>> some without file systems.   This is all still freely available, and stored
>>> with the Unix archives.
>>>
>> Could you provide a link to said environment, and suggest what sort of
>> machines it might have run on?  I probably have something here that will do
>> it, and I am very interested.
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>>
>>> On 12/1/21 12:59 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>>>
>>> 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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