[TUHS] Ratfor revived!

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Indeed.

I never worked with this directly, though. I went to grad school
at Georgia Tech, where some of the students had started with the tools
from the book and built a beautiful Unix-like subsystem on top of
Primos on Pr1me minicomputers.  (This code was recoverd in 2019,
after thinking it'd been lost for 30+ years!)

I never asked, but I suspect that the Georgia Tech guys simply didn't
know about the LBL work, or else they developed in parallel.

Arnold

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.
>
> Deborah
>
> 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
> >