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

[John Cowan]

It would be interesting to know if the S.T. in P. programs will run on
{GNU,Free} Pascal.

On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 7:41 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/28/22 5:31 PM, Will Senn wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
> On the good news front, I was able to find a working pi/px environment -
> 4.2bsd built from tape on simulated vax780 works great (thank god vi works
> there, too) and will run the programs in the book without mods, out of the
> box. 4.3 would probably work similarly (I put it on the list). I tried
> compiling the pascal distributed via 2bsd on v7, but wasn't able to get it
> built (story of my life). This is prolly expected because the notes in the
> distro say "This is still set up for version 6", so I'll stick with 4.2 for
> the time being. Just glad to have a working environment to supplement the
> reading.
>
> Will
>
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