As an aside about Wolfram and SMP (and one that actually has
something to do with UNIX):
I ran the VAX on which Wolfram et al (and it was very much et al)
developed SMP. It started out running UNIX/TS 1.0. I know how
that system was snuck out of Bell Labs, but if I told you I'd have
to terminate you with extreme prejudice. (I wasn't involved
anyway.)
SMP really needed dynamic paging; the TS 1.0 kernel had only
swapping. We had quite a few discussions about what to do.
Moving wholesale to 3BSD or early 4BSD (this was in 1981)
would have been a big upheaval for our entire user community.
Those systems were also notorious at the time for their delicate
stability: some people reported that they ran well, others that
they crashed frequently. Our existing system was pretty solid,
and I had already put some work into making it more so (better
handling of low-level machine errors, for example).
Somehow we ended up deciding that the least-painful path was
to lift the VM code out of 4BSD and shoehorn it into our
existing kernel, creating what we called Bastardized Paging
UNIX. I did most of the work; I was younger and more energetic
back then. Also considerably grumpier. In the heart of the
page-in (I think) code, the Berkeley guys had written a single
C function that stretched to about ten printed pages. (For those
too young to remember printers, that means about 600 lines.)
I was then and still am adamant that that's the wrong way to
write anything, but I didn't want to take the time to rewrite
it all, so (being young and grumpy) I relieved my feelings by
adding a grumpy comment at the top of the source file.
I also wrote a paper about the work, which was published in
(of all places) AUUGN. I haven't read it in years but it was
probably a bit snotty. It nevertheless ended up causing a
local UNIX-systems-software company to head-hunt me (but at
the time I had no interest in leaving Caltech), so it must
not have been too rude.
What days those were, when a single person could understand
enough of the OS to do stuff like that in only a month or two,
and get it pretty much right too. I did end up finding some
interesting race-condition bugs, probably introduced by me, but
fascinating to track down; e.g. something that went wrong only
if a page fault happened at exactly the right time with respect
to something else.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Donald ODana:
already 20 years ago I met a guy (masters degree, university) who never
freed dynamically allocated memory. He told me he is 'instantiating
a object', but had no idea what an heap is, and what dynamically
allocated memory means.
====
This is the sort of programmer for whom garbage collection was named:
his programs are a collection of garbage.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(In 1127-snark mode this evening)
>Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 17:47:22 +1100 (EST)
>From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
>To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
>Subject: [TUHS] Of birthdays etc
>Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.1802171649520.798(a)aneurin.horsfall.org>
>Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII
>
>...
>Harris' Lament? Look it up with your favourite search engine (I don't use Google).
>
probably early 1995 I dabbled a bit in AltaVista Search. So even now
still using Yahoo somehow :-)
Keep it coming Dave, it's appreciated, at least by me.
>From a former DECcie,
uncle rubl
Blimey... How was I to know that a throw-away remark would almost develop
into a shitfight? It would help if people changed the Subject line too,
as I'm sure that Ken must've been a little peeved... It would also help
if users didn't bloody top-post either, but I suspect that I've lost that
fight.
Anyway, this whole business started when I thought it might be a good idea
to post reminders of historical events here, as I do with some of the
other lists that I infest^W infect^W inhabit. I figured that the old
farts here might like to be reminded of (IMHO) significant events, and
similarly the youngsters might want to be reminded that there was indeed
life before Linux (which, by the way, I happen to loathe, but that's a
different story).
I'm glad that some people appreciate it; and don't worry, Steffen, you'll
soon catch up, as they should all be in the archives :-) A long-term goal
(if I live that long) is to set up one of those "this day in history"
sites, but it looks like Harris' Lament[*] has already applied :-(
I've had a number of corrections (thanks!), some weird comments on
pronunciation (an Englishman can probably pick my ancestry from me saying
"castle" as "c-AH-stle" and "dance" as "d-A-nce" etc), but oddly enough no
criticism (well, unless I'm talking about mounting a magtape as a
filesystem; no, I will not forget the implication that I was a liar), and
Warren has yet to spank me...
For the morbidly curious I keep these events in Calendar on my MacBook
(which actually spends most of its time in Terminal, and I don't even know
how to use the Finder!), and am always noting things which interest me and
therefore possibly others.
Anyway, thanks all; it is an honour and a privilege to share a mailing
list with some of the people who wrote the software that I have both used
in the past and still use to this day.
[*]
Harris' Lament? Look it up with your favourite search engine (I don't use
Google).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
> On Feb 14, 2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> Computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth was born on this day in 1934; he basically
> designed ALGOL, one of the most influential languages ever, with just
> about every programming language in use today tracing its roots to it.
Wirth designed many languages, including Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon, but he did not design Algol; more specifically, he did not design Algol 60. Instead, a committee (J. W. Backus, F. L. Bauer, J. Green, C. Katz, J. McCarthy, P. Naur, A. J. Perlis, H. Rutishauser, K. Samelson, B. Vauquois, J .H. Wegstein, A. van Wijngaarden, and M. Woodger) designed it, and Peter Naur edited the remarkable Algol 60 specification. A few others, including Edsgar Dijkstra, who completed the first implementation, participated in meetings leading up to the final design.
From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
> Like PL/I, it also
> borrowed the indispensable notion of structs from business languages
> (Flowmatic, Comtran, Cobol).
That is an interesting insight. I always thought that structs were
inspired by the assembler DORG construct, and hence the shared namespace
for members.
The above insight goes some way to explain why PDP11 “as” did not have
a DORG construct, but early C did have ‘struct'.
Paul
So people have called me on the claim that lisp is not fast. Here's a
rebuttal.
Please write a clone of GNU grep in lisp to demonstrate that the claim
that lisp is slower that C is false.
Best of luck and I'll be super impressed if you can get even remotely
close without dropping into C or assembler. If you do get close, I
will with draw my claim, stand corrected, point future "lisp is slow"
people at the lisp-grep, and buy you dinner and/or drinks.
--lm
> From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
> the proof here is to show up with a pure lisp grep that is fast as the C
> version. ... I've never seen a lisp program that out performed a well
> written C program.
Your exact phrase (which my response was in reply to) was "lisp and
performance is not a thing". You didn't say 'LISP is not just as fast as C' -
a different thing entirely. I disagreed with your original statement, which
seems to mean 'LISP doesn't perform well'.
Quite a few people spent quite a lot of time making LISP compiler output fast,
to the point that it was possible to say "this compiler is also intended to
compete with the S-1 Pascal and FORTRAN compilers for quality of compiled
numeric code" [Brooks,Gabriel and Steele, 1982] and "with the development of
the S-1 Lisp compiler, it once again became feasible to implement Lisp in Lisp
and to expect similar performance to the best hand-tuned,
assembly-language-based Lisp systems" [Steele and Gabriel, 1993].
Noel
> Computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth was born on this day in 1934; he basically
> designed ALGOL, one of the most influential languages ever, with just
> about every programming language in use today tracing its roots to it.
Rather than "tracing its roots to it", I'd say "has some roots in it".
Algol per se hardly made a ripple in the US market, partly due to
politics and habit, but also because it didn't espouse separate
compilation. However, as asserted above, it had a profound impact on
language designers and counts many languages as descendants.
To bring the subject back to Unix, C followed Fortran's modularity and
Algol's block structure. (But it reached back across the definitive Algol
60 to pick up the "for" statement from Algol 58.) Like PL/I, it also
borrowed the indispensable notion of structs from business languages
(Flowmatic, Comtran, Cobol). It adopted pointers from Lisp, as polished
by BCPL (pointer arithmetic) and PL/I (the -> operator). For better or
worse, it went its own way by omitting multidimensional arrays.
So C has many roots. It just isn't fashionable in computer-language
circles to highlight Cobol in your family tree.
Doug
