> "The requirement that awk add a trailing <newline> to the program argument
> text is to simplify the grammar, making it match a text file in form."
This should no more be a *requirement* for awk than globbing should have
been a requirement for MS-DOS apps. A widespread principle deserves a
widespread answer. If it is a requirement on awk, then for interoperability
it should be made a requirement on all programs that handle text files,
especially editors.
The way to do that, of course, would be to redefine text file to allow a
non-newline as the last character. Ugh.
Not warning perpetuates travesties like "awk END{print NR}' " giving a different
answer than "wc -l".
I agree that awk does the kind thing by supplying the final newline. But
it should recognize that this is non-standard behavior and warn in the
interest of discouraging the proliferation of garbage.
Postel's so-called "robustness principle" is in play here. "Be conservative
in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" would better read,
"Send conservatively; receive amply but grudgingly".
Doug
Re: newlines at the end of files.
I hesitate to ask this in such exalted company, but isn’t it a question of whether the newline is (or should be) a line terminator, or a statement separator?
-Steve
>> info groff gives semantics for including nonempty files that don't end
>> with newline. Such files violate the Posix definition of text file.
>>
>> Although groff is certainly justified in providing semantics for
>> non-Posix text, I suggest that it should warn when it does so.
> That's true but I'm hesitant to put groff in the business of wagging its
> finger at users feeding it non-strictly-conforming text files when doing
> so doesn't cause it any problems.
Causing groff problems is an odd criterion. The fact that groff will paste
files together unless the first happens to end in a newline is a sign of
groff 's internals, not of the underlying problem.
A newline missing at the end of a file is typically a symptom of either the
incaution of some other program (perhaps an editor) or of a file having
been unexpectedly truncated (as by a program abort). The latter cause
is common enough to justify warning always, not just about cases that
are inconvenient to groff.
Groff is what it is, but if the treatment of absent final newlines were up
for grabs, I'd argue for the more common solution: in all cases insert
a newline and warn.
Doug
The March 2025 issue of an IEEE journal has published Marc Rochkind's
article on SCCS. TUHS list members discussed a draft version of the
article last fall. Here is its BibTeX entry:
@String{j-IEEE-TRANS-SOFTW-ENG = "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering"}
@Article{Rochkind:2025:RSC,
author = "Marc J. Rochkind",
title = "A Retrospective on the {Source Code Control System}",
journal = j-IEEE-TRANS-SOFTW-ENG,
volume = "51",
number = "3",
pages = "695--699",
month = mar,
year = "2025",
CODEN = "IESEDJ",
DOI = "https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2024.3524947",
ISSN = "0098-5589 (print), 1939-3520 (electronic)",
ISSN-L = "0098-5589",
bibdate = "Tue Mar 25 08:57:56 2025",
bibsource = "https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ieeetranssoftweng2020.bib",
acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
ajournal = "IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng.",
fjournal = "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering",
journal-URL = "https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=32",
keywords = "Codes; Control systems; CSSC; Mainframes; Merging;
Programming; SCCS; Software; software configuration
management; Software development management; software
engineering; Software engineering; software
reliability; Software reliability; software tools;
Source coding; source control management; version
control systems",
}
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The specs aren’t that quite equivalent:
1Kb SRAM vs 48K core memory, 32-bit vs 16-bit CPU and 24Mhz vs 1MHz, but what does that clock mean in MIPS?
Anyone want to take a stab at the Moore’s Law constant over 55 years, given the specs non-equivalence?
~2.5M times price change, = 2^22 times.
=====================
<https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/unix-history/firstport.html>
In 1970, they proposed buying a PDP-11 for about $65,000. [ $535,000 in 2025 according to US Inflation Calculator ]
=====================
Texas Instruments Introduces MSPM0C1104 as the Smallest Available Microcontroller
<https://linuxgizmos.com/texas-instruments-introduces-mspm0c1104-as-the-smal…>
Measuring only 1.38mm², this wafer chip-scale package MCU is 38% smaller than existing alternatives.
The MSPM0C1104 includes a
24MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ core (32-bit),
16KB of flash memory,
1KB of SRAM,
a 12-bit ADC with three channels, and
six GPIO pins.
It also supports standard communication interfaces,
including UART, SPI, and I2C.
Additional features include 5V-tolerant I/Os,
a 1-channel DMA controller,
a CRC-16 accelerator, and
various timers, including a 16-bit advanced timer
and two 16-bit general-purpose timers.
These MCUs operate in an extended temperature range from -40°C to 125°C
and support supply voltages from 1.62V to 3.6V.
The MSPM0 series starts at $0.16 in 1,000-unit quantities, with multiple configurations available.
=====================
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
Hi all, I've just received a set of MP3 recordings from Bob Kridle. He says:
These are recordings of Ken Thompson doing a read through of one of
an early UNIX kernel code listing with a group of grad students at
UC Berkeley while he was a visiting prof. there.
The date is roughly 1975. I've put the recordings here along with his
e-mails about the recordings:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Recordings/1975_Unix_Code_Walkthru/
I've only just listened to the first few minutes of each. The quality
is fine, but I might spend some time reducing the noise, bringing up
the quiet parts and removing a few clicks and pops.
If anybody else has more details of these recording, please let us know!
Cheers, Warren
Hi All.
A while back I found a copy of the MPM macros and code
that I undoubtedly got from Brian Kernighan.
Warren has put it in the archives:
> Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:04:55 +1000
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com>
> Cc: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: MPM macros and code
>
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 03:11:47PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > I have the following file:
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold arnold 100770 Feb 17 2002 mpm.shar
>
> Thanks Arnold, I've just put it here:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Typesetting/
>
> Cheers! Warren
Thanks Warren!
Arnold
Hi All.
A while back I found the Caldera release of awk, grep and
libregex from 2001. The tar file is dated 2012, but the
actual code is from earlier.
Warren has put it in the archive:
> Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:07:12 +1000
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com>
> Cc: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: Caldera release of awk, grep, and libregex from 2001
>
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2025 at 06:42:50PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > I'm looking through my Downloads directory to try to clean it up
> > a bit. I found this:
> >
> > $ ls -l osutils.tar.gz
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 101072 Nov 25 2012 osutils.tar.gz
>
> Thanks for this as well, it's now at:
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Awk_Grep/
>
> Cheers, Warren
Thanks Warren!
Arnold
Hello all , Here I am again , Maybe my ? might be relative to the
community .
I grabbed an archive of precompiled gnu software , During the
extraction I got a 'warning' from a gzip'd tar & decided to dig into the
underlying tarball to see if it was trully corrupted or repairable .
Tada , I did a silly and less'd one of the binary files and noticed
that the underlying file was 'ar'd by /usr/local/alphaev6-dec-osf5.1b/bin/ar ,
well all said and done My ol' as100 ain't a ev6 .
So my Question , Could I use these programs that were created on a ev6 cpu
system on my ev4 ?
Tia , JimL
--
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS |
| Network & System Engineer | 3237 Holden Road | Give me Linux |
| jiml(a)system-techniques.com | Fairbanks, AK. 99709 | only on AXP |
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