TUHS October 2024

tuhs@tuhs.org

20 participants
6 discussions

Old troff files (1988-2007)

by Jacobson, Doug W [E CPE]

Folks: Long story short, I have a unpublished manuscript that a faculty member in my department wrote late 1980's early 2000's. He did the entire thing in troff, eqn, and pic. The faculty member is still alive. A publisher is interested in the manuscript. I have all of the source files on an old unix machine that still has troff, eqn and pic. It also has groff. This issue is that the pic commands are bracketed by .G1 and .G2 not .PS & .PE. The original machine he would have used would have ran AT&T Sys V on an AT&T 3B20. Below is one of the files. Any thoughts on the .G1 .G2? I can get the files that have only eqn and troff to create postscript, but the .G1/.G2 is not understood by pic. I tried replacing the .G1/.G2 with .PS/PE and it failed. I must be missing another program that uses the .G1/2 Thanks .sp -3.5 .fp 1 Z .fp 2 XI .ps 11 .tl ' ' '1-10' .EQ delim $$ gsize 11 .EN .po 0.9i .vs 15 .G1 frame wid 5.7 ht 6.0 invis coord x 0.2, 100 y -40, +22 log x grid left from -30 to +20 by 10 "" grid left from -40.04 to +19.96 by 10 "" grid left from -39.96 to +20.04 by 10 "" grid left from -39 to +22 by 1 "" grid bot from 0.4 to 40 by *10 "" grid bot from 1 to 100 by *10 "" grid bot from 0.2 to 20 by *10 "" grid bot from 0.3 to 30 by *10 "" grid bot from 0.5 to 50 by *10 "" grid bot from 0.6 to 60 by *10 "" grid bot from 0.7 to 70 by *10 "" grid bot from 0.8 to 80 by *10 "" grid bot from 0.9 to 90 by *10 "" ticks out left from -40 to +20 by 10 ticks out bot from 0.2 to 20 by *10 ticks out bot from 0.4 to 40 by *10 ticks out bot from 1 to 100 by *10 draw solid 0.2 19.93 2 19.93 10 5.97 100 -34.02 new solid 0.2 20.07 2 20.07 10 6.05 100 -33.95 new dotted for i=0.45 to 23 by *1.05 do { w=i*i f=200/sqrt(w*w+104*w+400) next at i,20*log(f) } label left "\u\udB \d\d" label bot "\(*w, rad/s" .G2 .in 2 Fig. 1.4. Graph of the magnitude in dB of $H(s)~=~200 over{s sup 2~+~12^s~+~20}^,$$~s~=~j^omega$. Doug Jacobson University Professor, Dept. Electrical & Computer Engineering Sunil & Sujata Gaitonde Professorship in Cybersecurity Director: ISU Center for Cybersecurity Innovation and Outreach Mail Address: 2520 Osborn Dr, 2215 Coover Hall Iowa State University PH: (515) 294-8307 Fax (515) 294-8432 Office: 371 Durham Hall Center web site: http://www.cyio.iastate.edu/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/www.cyio.iastate.edu/__;!!DZ3fjg!oVZir7OL…> Personal web site: http://www.dougj.net<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/www.dougj.net/__;!!DZ3fjg!oVZir7OL4VMZHCY…>

2 hours, 9 minutes

Re: Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

by Douglas McIlroy

> C's refusal to specify dynamic memory allocation in the language runtime > (as opposed to, eventually, the standard library) This complaint overlooks one tenet of C: every operation in what you call "language runtime" takes O(1) time. Dynamic memory allocation is not such an operation. Your hobbyhorse awakened one of mine. malloc was in v7, before the C standard was written. The standard spinelessly buckled to allow malloc(0) to return 0, as some implementations gratuitously did. I can't imagine that any program ever actually wanted the feature. Now it's one more undefined behavior that lurks in thousands of programs. There are two arguments for malloc(0), Most importantly, it caters for a limiting case for aggregates generated at runtime--an instance of Kernighan's Law, "Do nothing gracefully". It also provides a way to create a distinctive pointer to impart some meta-information, e.g. "TBD" or "end of subgroup", distinct from the null pointer, which merely denotes absence. Doug

2 days, 4 hours

Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

by Warren Toomey

All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link. Cheers, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp ----- I stumbled over this: https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ? ----- End forwarded message -----

3 days, 6 hours

Re: On computerese

by Douglas McIlroy

> Who created the "cat" command and did they have the > word "catenate" or "concatenate" in their heads? Ken Thompson wrote "cat" for the PDP-7, with "concatenate" in mind. The cat(1) page in the v1 manual is titled, "concatenate (or print) files". Only later did someone in Research--I don't know who--remark on the existence of the shorter synonym. It was deliberately adopted in v7, perhaps because it better mirrored the command name. But brevity is the defensible argument for "catenate", while familiarity boosts "concatenate". It stll takes some conscious effort for me to use the former, However, I sense sinister vibes in "concatenate", driven by the phrase "concatenation of events", which often is used to explain misfortune. Doug

3 days, 12 hours

Re: Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

by Douglas McIlroy

>>> malloc(0) isn't undefined behaviour but implementation defined. >> >> In modern C there is no difference between those two concepts. > Can you explain more about your view There certainly is a difference, but in this case the practical implications are the same: avoid malloc(0). malloc(0) lies at the high end of a range of severity of concerns about implementation-definedness. At the low end are things like the size of ints, which only affects applications that may confront very large numbers. In the middle is the default signedness of chars, which generally may be mitigated by explicit type declarations. For the size of ints, C offers guardrails like INT_MAX. There is no test to discern what an error return from malloc(0) means. Is there any other C construct that implementation-definedness renders useless? Doug

3 days, 13 hours

Origins of "Unix Philosophy"

by Phil Budne

I'm wondering if there are places where people who were in the Unix Room wrote about the origins and evolution of what people (at least used to(*)) refer to as "Unix Philosophy", and since some are in THIS (TUHS) room, what they might have to say about it. How much was in reaction to the complexity of Multics, and how much was simply a response to the limited address spaces of available and affordable hardware? Eric S. Raymond wrote in "The Art of Unix Programming" quoting Doug McIlroy and Rob Pike: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html And I wonder if they care to comment on it? I have trouble taking ESR as authoritative, as, it seems to me that Research Unix was more a product of the "Cathedral" (or at least a contained community) than the "Bazaar" (at least the modern bazaar, where everyone needs to leave a new feature grafito on the town walls), and ESR A side question for Rob Pike, is the "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." quote accurate? Was it in reaction to BSD, GNU, or all of the above? (*) I say "used to", because, for the most part, minimalism seems to have left the building. I can't look at modern GNU utilities, and many, if not most open source packages and think they've gone WAY past classic Unix minimalism, especially since I remember hearing that Bell Research had happily stripped excess features (removal of "cat -s" sticks in my mind) from later day research Unix, and because Stallman is said to have coined the term "New Jersey" style as a synonym for what Richard P. Gabriel called "Worse is Better", which seems, an attack on minimalism (nothing less than "the right thing" is acceptable) Worse is.... readings: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf Anti-flamage disclainmers: Inclusion of links above does not imply any agreement on my part! My apologies in advance for any offense, misquote, or misunderstanding on my part.

3 days, 21 hours

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TUHS October 2024