[TUHS] Documentation for Sys-V basic interpreter

[Clem Cole]

s/which had the version of PWB/which had the version of bs(1) from PWB
running on 4.xBSD/
ᐧ

On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 4:15 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Sure the sources and a man page or two exists.  Ken Thompson wrote bas(1)
> and bs(1) was Dick Haight - which IIRC correctly, was ~78/79.  Haight's
> program which would go out as part of System V ---  was first distributed
> outside of the labs in System III. I would have expected man pages in
> either source distribution.  I don't have those online to check and I don't
> tend to bother with System V as its historically less interesting.
>
> That said, one thing I do remember is that the primary version of bs from
> the PWB family (certainly the one we had at UCB) was a little different
> from the version I saw in a couple of the BTL sites later.  My >>memory<<
> here (which could be flawed) was the CB Unix folks added a few features --
> like a set of plotting function that Whippany picked up etc.  I only
> remember this because we were working with a number of different places
> (from different AT&T labs to IBM, Intel, NS, HP, Tek, etc.) when we
> developed the UCB CAD tools.   I remember and an incident where one of the
> Bell folks we had at UCB had brought some thing with him that relied on the
> strange bs dialec -- i.e. did not run on the UCB CAD systems - which had
> the version of PWB. It was close, but made calls to some extra stuff (plot
> and the like IIRC).
>
> My suggestion, as always start in the TUHS archives and look there -- that
> will be the most complete of what was released. That said,  Disk4 of Kirk's
> set will have all the stuff we had in /usr/local (like cpio etc..) on the
> UCB systems.  FWIW: I'm fairly sure the sources and the man pages will be
> with Kirk's trove. But I don't believe BSD ever released it, as it was
> not part of V7, so you will not find it in a formal BSD distribution tape.
>
> ᐧ
>
> On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 11:07 AM KenUnix <ken.unix.guy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi.
>>
>> Was any documentation ever done for the basic interpreter
>> that was on System-V?
>>
>> Things like allowed keywords or special keywords.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Ken
>>
>>
>> --
>> WWL 📚 Okey Dokey OK Boss
>>
>>
>>
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