[TUHS] "Notes on the IBM C Compiler" by Mike Lesk

[G. Branden Robinson via TUHS]

Hi Tom,

At 2026-07-11T21:51:38-0700, Tom Lyon via TUHS wrote:
> I finally managed to extract and format this document.
> Read it if you're in to horror literature!
> 
> It comes from the 'memo' file in
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/370_c_virgin_source.tar.gz
> 
> PDF here:
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eVfRW8QS7M11MfK4kFaWRMZLXtuLWjSj/view?usp=sharing

What troff did you use to format this document?  I ran into some
interesting problems with it, including one that chokes every tbl(1) I
have on hand to throw at it--except maybe Seventh Edition Unix tbl,
which I did not attempt.

Here's the litany of failure:

$ tbl memo >/dev/null # groff 1.24.1
tbl:memo:532: error: invalid column classifier 'h'
tbl:memo:532: error: giving up on this table region
$ dwb tbl memo >/dev/null # DWB 3.3
File memo, line 532: Bad table specification character 'h'
tbl quits
$ solaris10 tbl memo >/dev/null # GitHub Solaris10-ditroff
memo: line 532: bad table specification character
tbl quits
$ heirloom tbl memo >/dev/null

memo: line 532: bad table specification character
tbl quits
$ 9 tbl memo >/dev/null # GitHub plan9port

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'h'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'K'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'm'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'o'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'K'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'm'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'o'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'H'

memo:532: warning: unrecognized column modifier character 'o'

memo:532: too many columns in table
tbl quits

The cause of all this trouble is straightforward.

$ sed -n '530,532p' memo
.TS
l l l l l l
        Character       KA mode KB mode Holmdel Standard

There's no '.' at the end of the table description.

Some use of custom macros that have no evident definitions anywhere in
the tar archive are apparent.

$ sed -n '856,860p' memo
that may not be mixed with data.  Consider declarations of
the form
.ip
char *listp[] {"first", "second", "third"};
.tp

A page-local macro `mn` _is_ defined (at the top of the document), but
in one place it is misspelled.  This is a silent failure on AT&T troff,
but not necessarily with GNU troff, to which you can give the `-w mac`
option to diagnose calls of undefined macros (or requests, or
interpolations of undefined diversions).

I'm attaching some "modernizing" fixups for the document, in case
anyone's interested.

Regards,
Branden
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