Hello all,
I know that this isn't strictly a "UNIX history" question, but as I am
working with historic UNIX and this list contains a great number of people
who were instrumental in its development, I figured it would be appropriate
to ask here. If there's a better place for these sorts of questions,
please let me know.
I'm trying to figure out how the array size limits are set in the 2.11BSD
pcc compiler. I've looked through quite a bit of documentation but I don't
see anything that describes this. In theory on a 16 bit system I would
think that the maximum array size would be 64K, but the actual limit that I
found through trial and error is (2^15)-1.
Declaring an array that is too large results in an error of "Constant
required", which is being produced by c01.c in conexp().
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/src/lib/ccom/c01.c
I did quite a bit of searching through the source but I was not able to
determine where this limit is being set. This is where my usual tools fall
apart. Normally since I have the source I would compile the program I want
with debugging turned on, and then do a backtrace so that I could see how
we got to conexp(). But as far as I can tell I can't get a backtrace,
since there is no option for debugging information in pcc; adb can only
tell me where a process stopped.
I would appreciate any enlightenment or pointers to other documentation.
Thanks in advance!
-Henry
Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM):
Oh come on Rob, you should know that for anyone over the age of 50,
the moment you see 'dd' your brain automatically switches to JCL
mode.
===
Rob doubtless got IBM out of his system back in the
late 1970s, when I think he was one of the authors
of a shell that brought the TSO experience to Unix.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
On Monday, September 16th, 2024 at 6:28 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> I also have v9 on a Sun in TME
> ...
>
> -Henry
>
V9 you say...does your setup happen to have the on-line manpages by any chance? I don't think a surviving copy is in the TUHS archive. V9 is a tad bit fragmentary in the archive at present from what I can tell, it may be worth seeing if anything you have fills in blanks.
- Matt G.
Rob Pike:
I don't remember whether late Research Unix [dd] had -if, but Plan 9
certainly did.
===
I don't have a live 10/e system at the moment, but I have
the 10/e source tree handy. Classic parody-IBM syntax
only.
Aside: I'm curious: does anyone else have 8/e, 9/e, or
10/e running these days?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
The florid syntax of IBM's DD was rivaled by that of GE's file utility. I
always wondered whether it was named FUTIL unwarily or with tongue in cheek.
Doug

> On 15 Sep 2024, at 20:21, Rik Farrow <rik(a)rikfarrow.com> wrote:
> 
> Was the brevity typical of Unix command names a function of the tiny disk and memory available? Or more a function of having a Teletype 33 for input? Of course, it could simply be that 'cat' is more convenient than 'catenate'...
Hangover from assembly mnemonics, perhaps.
J
—
John Dow <jmd(a)nelefa.org>
Written by a human.
> https://retronaut.com/retronaut-capsules/1967-life-at-bell-labs
Luckham's introductory remark that all the programmers were men contrasts
with the situation 10 years before, when most of the programmers were
women. Women got shoved aside when it became apparent that programming was
an honorable and challenging engineering profession, not mere routine
translation of conceptual designd into machine language. It took almost 10
more years for the Labs to recognize that women programmers were engineers,
too.
Yet de jure recognition of women programmers has not yet become de facto.
Here at Dartmouth, as at many schools, women form a far smaller fraction of
computer science than they do of the engineering school. In engineering the
proportion of women reflects that in the general population.
Hi all,
I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a mysterious file
- /usr/lib/ecfe. It turns out that this is the Edison Design Group C (not
C++) Front End, included almost certainly by accident with the last release
of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX 4. No other piece of the compiler
toolchain references the EDG product in any way and there is no
documentation for it whatsoever.
The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to source
translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product - is that
correct? I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used in the Apogee C
compiler. I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it does appear that
"cfe" is the same EDG product. Unfortunately there is no documentation
specific to the C front end, and I don't have a license for Apogee C so I
can't run the compiler to see how it's calling cfe. Just running a C file
"blah.c" through the IRIX front end with no switches results in a
transformed file "blah.int.c". Unfortunately running anything even
moderately complex through the front end results in code that either
doesn't compile or doesn't run, so I feel that I must be missing some flags
or basic options.
Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or any
documentation/information in general about the EDG product? My usual
sources came up empty.
-Henry
>> I've despaired over the term ever since it wormed its way into
>> computer folks' vocabulary. How does a "use case" differ from a "use"?
>
> Clarity as to whether one is employing a noun or a verb. Both "use" and
> "case" can be either (he said, casing the joint for tomorrow's heist),
> but juxtaposing them thus unambiguously makes a noun phrase.
Usually context makes the nominal use of "use" clear : "many uses", "the
use",
"some uses". I'm not persuaded that "use case" disambiguates any more
reliably.
How do supermarkets display their wares?
For some use cases they use cases.
Metacomment. While the "use" in "nominal use" above must be a noun,
"nominal" isn't compelled to have the intended meaning of "being a noun".
It's a game of whac-a-mot. Kill one ambiguity and spawn another.
Doug
