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Joys of ASN.1 [Was: Re: tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?]

by Nemo Nusquam

Migration to COFF, methinks On 30/01/2021 18:20, John Cowan wrote: > Those were just examples. The hard part is parsing schemas, > especially if you're writing in C and don't know about yacc and lex.Â > That code tends to be horribly buggy. True but tools such as the commercial ASN.1 -> C translators are fairly good and even asn1c has come a long way in the past few decades. N. > > But unless you need to support PER (which outright requires the > schema) or unless you are trying to map ASN.1 compound objects to C > structs or the equivalent, you can just process the whole thing in the > same way you would JSON, except that it's binary and there are more > types. Easy-peasy, especially in a dynamically typed language. > > Once there was a person on the xml-dev mailing list who kept repeating > himself, insisting on the superiority of ASN.1 to XML. Finally I told > him privately that his emails could be encoded in PER by using 0x01 to > represent him (as the value of the author field) and allowing the > recipients to reconstruct the message from that! He took it in good part. > > > > John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan > <http://vrici.lojban.org/%7Ecowan> cowan(a)ccil.org <mailto:cowan@ccil.org> > Don't be so humble. You're not that great. > --Golda Meir > > > On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 10:52 PM Richard Salz <rich.salz(a)gmail.com > <mailto:rich.salz@gmail.com>> wrote: > > PER is not the reason for the hatred of ASN.1, it's more that the > specs were created by a pay-to-play organization that fought > against TCP/IP, the specs were not freely available for long > years, BER was too flexible, and the DER rules were almost too > hard to get right. Just a terse summary because this is probably > off-topic for TUHS. >

4 years, 4 months

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Happy birthday, Douglas Engelbart!

by Dave Horsfall

Born on this day in 1925, he was a pioneer in human/computer interaction, and invented the mouse; it wasn't exactly ergonomic, being just a square box with a button. -- Dave

4 years, 4 months

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termination and untermination of bugtraq mailing list

by Tomasz Rola

Howdy, Perhaps this is off topic for this list, if so, apologies in advance. Or perhaps this will be of interest to some who do not trace yet another mailing list out there :-). Two days ago I received a notice that bugtraq would be terminated, and archive shut down on 31st this month. Only then I realized (looking at the archive also helped a bit in this) that last post to bugtraq happened in the last days of Feb 2020. After that, eleven months of nothing, and shutdown notice. It certainly was not because of list being shunned, because I have seen posters on other lists cc-ing to bt, yet their posts never went that route (apparently) and I suppose they were not postponed either. If they were, I would now get an eleven months worth of it. But no. Too bad. I liked bt, even if I had not followed every post. Today, a notice that they would not terminate bt (after second thought, as they wrote). And a fresh post from yesterday. But what could possibly explain an almost year long gap? Their computers changed owners last year, and maybe someone switched the flip, were fired, nobody switched it on again? Or something else? Just wondering. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com **

4 years, 4 months

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Beards (was: Bearded Fellow, Ken Thompson)

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[moved to COFF] On Monday, 18 January 2021 at 15:47:48 -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote: > On Mon, 18 Jan 2021, John Cowan wrote: > >> (When I met my future wife I was 21, and she wanted me to grow a beard, so >> I did. Since then I have occasionally asked cow orkers who have complained >> about shaving why *they* don't grow beards: the most common answer is "My >> wife doesn't want me to." *My* wife doesn't believe this story.) > > I actually had to shave for a while specifically because of my > then-girlfriend, so... ;p I can see that. Early on I made a decision that no woman could make me shave my beard, and I stuck to it. Not that the beard was more important, but if she wanted it gone, she was looking at the wrong things. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] Bearded Fellows (was TUHS)

by Clem Cole

> > When I met my future wife I was 21, and she wanted me to grow a beard, so > I did. Since then I have occasionally asked coworkers who have complained > about shaving why *they* don't grow beards: the most common answer is "My > wife doesn't want me to." > Moved to COFF ... while bearded UNIX folks do seem to be a common thread, I think we are stretching Warren's patience a tad. So ... I have sort of a different story. I had shaved in off and on during college and in the first few years I was working but had grown it back before grad school. I still was not sure I liked having it, and as I got close to finishing, I mentioned to my officemates at UCB that I'd shave it when Newton (our advisor) signed my thesis as a signal to everyone I was done. So the day I came into the office clean-shaven, Peter Moore looks up and remarked, 'now I know why you wore one.' So, I showed up at Masscomp without it and was quickly ostracized as so many of the SW team had some sort of facial hair, I quickly grew it back. Roll forward 20ish years and my wife egged me into shaving it off one summer weekend. Our then 5-year-old daughter cried -- she wanted her Daddy back. I've had it ever since. That said, 20 years later she and her mother both claim I would look younger if I shaved it. But at this point, I kinda like not having to shave my neck and lower chin every day if I don't want to; so I have ignored them.

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The 2038 bug...

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

Redirecting to COFF. COBOL has really nothing to do with Unix. On Thursday, 7 January 2021 at 20:25:56 -0500, Nemo Nusquam wrote: > On 01/07/21 17:56, Stuart Remphrey wrote (in part): >>> Dave, who's kept his COBOL knowledge a secret in every job >> >> Indeed! [...]; but especially COBOL: apart from everything else, too >> much like writing a novel to get anything done. > > As long as we are bashing COBOL, I recall that someone -- name forgotten > -- wrote a parody that contained statements such as "Verily, let the > noble variable N be assigned the value known as one". Heh. In 1973 I was once required to abandon assembler, the language of Real Programmers, and write a program in COBOL (in fact, a database front end to COBOL). I took revenge in the label names. From http://www.lemis.com/grog/src/GOPU INVOKE SCHEMA KVDMS COPYING COMMON ALL RECORD COMMON DELIVERY-AREA IS PUFFER OVERLAY PUFFER WITH ALL ERROR RECOVERY IS HELL ROLLBACK IS IMPOSSIBLE. ... MAKE-GOPU. IF ERROR-STATUS IS NOT EQUAL TO '000307', GO TO HELL. Admire that manifest constant. And yes, this program went into production. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

4 years, 5 months

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In Memoriam: Grace Hopper

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper on this day in 1992; amongst other things she gave us COBOL and ADA, and was allegedly responsible for the term "debugging" when she removed a moth from a relay on the Harvard Mk I and taped it to the log. -- Dave

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Algol 68 and Unix (was cron and at ...)

by Clem Cole

Moving to COFF since this is really not UNIX as much as programming philosophy. On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 9:36 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > So the C version was easier for me to understand. But it sort of > lost something, I didn't really understand Steve's version, not at any > deep level. But it made more sense, somehow, than the C version did. > I'm not too hard on Steve as herein lies the dichotomy that we call programming. Looking back the BourneGOL macros were clearly convenient for him as the original author and allow him to express ideas that he had well in his source. They helped him to create the original and were comforting in the way he was used to. Plus, as Larry notes, the action of transpiling loses that (BTW -- look some time at comments in the C version of advent and you can still vestiges of the original Fortran). But the problem is that when we create a new program, we can easily forget that it might live forever[1] - particularly if you are a researcher trying to advance and explore a set of ideas (which of course is what Steve was at the time). And as has been noted in many other essays, the true cost of SW is in the maintenance of it, not the original creation. So making something easy to understand, particularly in the future without the context, starts to become extremely attractive - particularly when it has a long life and frankly impact beyond what is was originally considered. It's funny, coming across BourneGOL help to validate/teach/glue into me an important concept when programming for real -> the idea of "least astonishment" or "social acceptance" of your work. Just because you understand it and like it might not be the same for your sisters and brothers in the community. There is no such thing as a private program. The moment a program leaves your desk/terminal, it will be considered and analyzed by others. So back to the time and seeing BourneGOL for the first time, please consider that in the mid-70s, I was coming to C from BLISS, SAIL, Algol-W as my HLLs, so I was used to BEGIN/END style programming and bracketing lining up 4 spaces under the next line with B/E in the same column. The White Book did not yet exist, but what would become 'one-true bracing style' later described in K&R was used in the code base for Fifth and Sixth Edition. When I first saw that, it just looked wrong to me. But I was coming from a different social setting and was using a different set of social norms to evaluate this new language and the code written in it. At some point I took CMU's SW engineering course where we had to swap code 3 different times with other groups for the team projects, and I had come to realize how important making things be understood by the next team was. So, I quickly learned to accept K&R style and like Ron and Larry cursed Steve a little. And while I admire Steve for his work and both ADB and Bourne Shell were tools I loved and used daily, when I tried to maintain them I had wished that Steve had thought about those that would come after - but I do accept that was not on his radar. That lesson has served me well for many years as a professional and it's a lesson I try to teach with my younger engineers in particular. It's not about being 100% easy for you now, it is about being easy for someone other than you that has to understand your code in the future. Simply use the social norms of the environment you live and work ("do as the Romans" if you will). Even if it is a little harder now, learn the community norms, and use them. FWIW: You can actually date some of my learnings BTW with fsck (where we did not apply this rule). Ted and I have come from MTS and TSS respectively (*i.e.* IBM 360), which you remember from this first few versions had all errors in UPPER CASE (we kept that style from the IBM system -- not the traditional UNIX style). For many years after its success and the program spreading like wildfire within the UNIX community, I would run it on a system and be reminded of my failure to learn that lesson yet. Clem [1] BTW: the corollary to living forever, is that the worst hacks you do seem to be the ones that live the longest. ᐧ

4 years, 5 months

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Running Scheme On Bare Metal (Experience Report)

by Bakul Shah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWr4iQfc0uw Abstract of the talk @ ICFP 2020 Programming language implementations have features such as threads, memory management, type safety, and REPLs that duplicate some of the work done by the underlying operating system. The objective of hosting a language on bare metal is to unify the language implementation and operating system to have a lean system with no redundancy for running applications. This seems to be the OS: https://github.com/udem-dlteam/mimosa The Mimosa operating system consists of a minimal kernel built on C++ and Scheme. It contains a Scheme implementation of a hard drive (ATA) driver, keyboard (PS2), serial (8250 UART), FAT32 filesystem and a small real time clock manager. The project was built to experiment with developement of operating system using a high level functional language to study the developement process and the use of Scheme to build a fairly complex system.

4 years, 5 months

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Algol68 (was Re: [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

by Bakul Shah

On Dec 16, 2020, at 8:08 PM, John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote: > > Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if A68 had become the medium-level language of Unix, and Pascal had become the language of non-Unix, instead of both of them using C. Funny how we seem to rehash the same things over the years! In a 1988 comp.lang.misc thread when I expressed hope that "a major subset of Algol 68 with a new and concise syntax (sort of like C's) can make a very elegant, type safe and well rounded language.", Piet van Oostrum[1] commented the combination of dynamic arrays *and* unions forced the use of GC in Algol68. Either feature by themselves wouldn't have required GC! The larger point being that compiler complexity is "almost exponential" (his words) to the number of added features. Piet and others also wrote that both Pascal and C had left out a lot of the hard things in A68. So I doubt A68 or a subset would have replaced C or Pascal in 70s-80s. [My exposure to Algol68 was when I had stumbled upon Brailsford and Walker's wonderful "Introductory Algol 68 programming" @ USC. After having used PL/I, Pascal & Fortran the regularity of A68 was quite enticing but AFAIK no one used A68 at USC. I must admit I still like it more than modern languages like Java, Go, Rust, C++, ...] [1] Piet had implemented major parts of both A68 and A60.

4 years, 6 months

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