[TUHS] Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

[Henry Bent]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2025 at 09:15, Chet Ramey via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On 3/4/25 4:55 PM, Rob Gingell wrote:
>
> > On 3/4/25 7:07 AM, Chet Ramey via TUHS wrote:
> >> We expected a lot less from the system and compiler in the bash-1.12
> days;
> >> that helped here.
> >
> > How would those expectations differ from what V7 provided, as PAUNIX's
> > ambitions only went that far (not that they couldn't be expanded but...)
> > The thing is the Harrenstein C must've gotten more complete runtime
> support
> > to run 1.12 and seems like that'd exceed V7 and make PAUNIX even more
> futile.
>
> This would have been 1991-1992, so we were working on mostly 4.3 BSD (me)
> and SunOS (Brian). We didn't expect more than K&R from the compiler, even
> though we were primarily using gcc. It was before autoconf, so we rolled
> our own version to create a `sysdefs.h', and had code to choose between
> POSIX, USG, and BSD versions of functions. I don't think it would have
> compiled on anything older than possibly 4.2 BSD, and probably not that,
> so I think your speculation about the post-V7 runtime support is on the
> mark.


I have bash-2.04 running on 4.1C BSD.  I don't remember whether I used
gcc-1.42 or gcc-2.81 to build it, but it was one of the two.  In my
experience 2.04 is the last version that will successfully build and run on
many very older systems, though I believe there are a few where I was not
able to get past 1.14.  At least on 4.1C, I've successfully used 2.04 to
run all sorts of configure scripts and I don't remember ever having run
into significant issues.

-Henry
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