> Does anyone know if dbx ended up 8 or 9th
I believe the only debuggers on research machines were
db v1-v6
adb v7,v9,v10
cdb v3-v6
sdb v8-v9
pi v8-v10
Doug
Reading some more stuff about the road from 7th Edition to 8th Edition, this time about debuggers.
My current understanding is as follows:
- On 6th edition the debugger was ‘cdb’
- On 7th edition it was ‘adb’, a rewrite / evolution from ‘cdb’
- In 32V a new debugger appears, ‘sdb’. Its code seems a derivative from ‘adb’, but the command language is substantially reworked and it uses a modified variant of the a.out linker format - in essence the beginnings of ‘stabs’. Of course the compiler, assembler, linker and related tools all emit/recognize these new symbol table elements.
- The July 78 file note by London/Reiser does not mention a reworked debugger at all; the 32V tape that is on TUHS has ’sdb' files that are dated Feb/Mar 1979. This stuff must have been developed between July 78 and March 79.
- In the SysIII and 3BSD code on TUHS (from early 80 and late 79 respectively) the stabs format is more developed. For SysIII it is ‘VAX only’. With these roots, it is not surprising that it is also in 8th Edition.
Two questions:
(1) According to Wikipedia the original author of the stabs format is unknown. It also says that the original author of ‘sdb’ is unknown. Is that correct, is the author really unknown?
(2) As far as I can tell, the ’sdb’ debugger was never back ported to 16 bit Unix, not in the SysIII line and not in the 2.xBSD line. It would seem to me that the simple stabs format of 32V would have lent itself to being back ported. Is it correct that no PDP11 Unix used (a simple) stabs tool chain and debugger?
I've forgotten who created stdio, USG or the research group. Can any of the
youthful BTL folks of the 1970's refresh my mind.
Given that stdio was invented and, in my opinion at the time, a reasonable
and usable standard interface to IO on Unix, I am curious why no standard
for networking was developed or proposed and discussed. Sockets just
defined a new and very quirky IO interface for Unix based systems.
Was any thought given to defining networking
using the
creat/open/read/write/close/mknod/link/unlink/chmod/chown
model of IO in UNIX?
Ed Bradford
--
Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.
Cicero
I was lucky enough to be in the room last year at VCF East when Ken
told the story of how the move from Berkeley to Bell Labs happened.
Ken's description of his interactions with the Bell recruiter was
entertaining and made clear that persistent effort was needed to get
him to come out to New Jersey and meet some of the people there.
Does anyone know who the recruiter was?
hello
Was sml/nj part of UNIX at some point? was it considered as a language to use
(proof tools may be)?
I was wondering if there is any history in common between the two. I've been
unable to find anything :-?, please share your stories! :-D
Is it true that the language was too slow to be generally useful? There seems
to be commentaries along these lines on the internet.
thanks!
gabi
>> Compile time was measured. My favorite "bug" was the
>> many minutes it took to compile a constant expression
>> that involved shifting a constant INT_MAX bits by
>> performing that many 1-bit shifts.
>
> I don't know if this anecdote is an urban legend or if it really
> happened. I was told [a similar] story when I was interning as an operator
> at my alma mater, which was an IBM System/360 shop.
I heard it not from the grapevine, but from McKeeman himself.
Doug
> random small C programs with computable expected outputs
"computable" is subtle here. The only way to compute the
outputs was to run the program. McKeeman's trick was to
sic several completely unrelated compilers on the program
and let them vote on the answer.
Compile time was measured. My favorite "bug" was the
mmany minutes it took to compile a constant expression
that involved shifting a constant INT_MAX bits by
performing that many 1-bit shifts.
Doug
Doug's list is slightly off:
adb v7-v10
sdb v8-v10
sdb may actually have been in V7; I'm quite sure
it was present in 32/V. But it's not in the V7
manual.
adb and sdb were certainly working fine when I
arrived in 1127, but they still used ptrace
because nobody wanted to touch the code. I used
adb quite often (still would were it available
in modern worlds!), so I cared enough to take
it over, restructuring it quite a bit to make it
easier to retarget for different instruction
sets and byte orders, and of course to use /proc.
I also made some trivial, compatible changes to
how numbers were read and printed to conform to
Rob's Rule (of which I am also a fan) that what
a program presents as output it should also
accept as input.
sdb I wasn't as fond of, but I did want to get
rid of ptrace, so I tinkered it just enough to
accomplish that.
I do remember clearly celebrating the death of
ptrace by removing ptrace(2) from the copy of the
V8 manual in the UNIX Room. It took up two
pages, and they happened to be facing pages,
so I glued them together.
I wish it was as easy for others to have such
satisfaction these days.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
