[TUHS] Looking back to 1981 - what pascal was popular on what unix?

[Will Senn]

On 1/28/22 5:18 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:09 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     I'm reading in, Kernighan & Plauger's 1981 edition of Software
>     Tools in Pascal and in the book, the author's mention Bill Joy's
>     Pascal and Andy Tanenbaum's as being rock solid. So, a few related
>     questions:
>
>     1. What edition of UNIX were they likely to be using?
>
>
> I'm afraid I can't speak to your 2nd and 3rd questions, but I can 
> offer what I think is a reasonable guess about the first.
>
> One of the neat things about Unix and Unix-adjacent books of that era 
> is that very often the copyright page held some information about the 
> production of the book itself. I just so happened to have a copy of, 
> "Software Tools in Pascal" sitting on my desk, and it says, "This 
> books as set in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using a 
> Mergenthaler Linotron 202 phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 
> running the Unix operating system."
>
> Given the PDP-11 and the date (1981) one may reasonably conclude that 
> it was running 7th Edition. I imagine the pascal was Joy's, from Berkeley.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
Great hint. 20 seconds after I hit send on the original email, I came 
across this:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

Where Brian Kernighan talks about the challenges they faced porting the 
ratfor examples into pascal. He explains that:

    The programs were first written in that dialect of Pascal supported
    by the Pascal interpreter pi provided by the University of
    California at Berkeley. The language is close to the nominal
    standard of Jensen and Wirth,(6
    <http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html#lit-6>) with good
    diagnostics and careful run-time checking. Since then, the programs
    have also been run, unchanged except for new libraries of
    primitives, on four other systems: an interpreter from the Free
    University of Amsterdam (hereinafter referred to as VU, for Vrije
    Universiteit), a VAX version of the Berkeley system (a true
    compiler), a compiler purveyed by Whitesmiths, Ltd., and UCSD Pascal
    on a Z80. All but the last of these Pascal systems are written in C.

So, you were right about it being Joy's pi.

Thanks,

Will
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20220128/d9f70271/attachment.htm>