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

[arnold at skeeve.com]

The code from Software Tools in Pascal is in the TUHS archives
(courtesy of yours truly, quite some time ago).

See Applications/Software_Tools/swt/Pascal/*

So give them a go. :-)

Arnold

John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

> 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
> >