TUHS

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6532 discussions

by Dave Horsfall

We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in 1906; known as "Amazing Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy. She coined the term "debugging" when she extracted a moth from a set of relay contacts from a computer (the Harvard Mk I) and wrote "computer debugged" in the log, taping the deceased Lepidoptera in there as well. She was convinced that computers could be programmed in an English-like language and developed Flow-Matic, which in turn became, err, COBOL... She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by Barack Obama. -- Dave

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] C comments

by Doug McIlroy

Very little in language design is so contentious as comment conventions. C borrowed the PL/I convention, which had the virtue of being useful for both in-line and interlinear comments, and did not necessitate marking every line of a long comment. Nobody in the Unix lab had had much experience with the convention, despite having worked on Multics for which PL/I was the implementation language. And how did PL/I get the convention? It was proposed by Paul Rogoway at the first NPL (as it was then called) design-committee meeting that I attended. Apparently the topic had been debated for some while before and people were tired of the subject. Paul was more firmly committed to his new idea than others were to old options, so it carried more or less by default. Besides, there was a much more interesting topic on the agenda. Between the previous meeting and that one, George Radin had revamped the entire NPL proposal from mainly Fortran-like syntax to Algol-like. That was heady enough stuff to divert people's attention from comments. As for inexperiece. The comment conventions of previous languages had not fostered the practice of commenting out code. So that idea, which is the main impetus for nesting comments, was not in anybody's mind at the time. Had it been, nesting might well have carried the day. It probably could have been changed before 1980, but thereafter there were too many C compilers. Then standards introduced even more conservatism. Perhaps Ken can remember whether the notion was ever seriously considered. Doug

6 years, 6 months

DEC compilers (was Happy birthday, John Backus!)

by Paul Winalski

Another DEC compiler that I forgot was the original C compiler for Tru64 Unix on the Alpha. This was done at the DECwest facility in Seattle (which originally had been set up by Dave Cutler). It was a very strict implementation of the ANSI C89 standard--it had no extensions such as K&R support. One customer called it the "Rush Limbaugh of C compilers" because it was extremely conservative and you couldn't argue with it. -Paul W.

6 years, 6 months

SDF's celebration of 50 years of UNIX

by Edouard KLEIN

Hi all, I haven't seen this on the list yet (apologies if I missed it): https://unix50.org/ You can get a shell in various historical version of UNIX. Enjoy !

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] c's comment

by Richard Tobin

> Why can't c language comments be nested? For comments that really are comments, what would be the point? For comments that are really removal of code - commenting out - there is a better mechanism, #if (or #ifdef), which does nest. -- Richard -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

6 years, 6 months

c's comment

by Caipenghui

Why can't c language comments be nested? What is the historical reason for language design?Feeling awkward. Caipenghui

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Stories

by Doug McIlroy

> So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems > people end up there? [At Bell Labs] 1. Bell Labs had a great reputation, though it was not at first known for computing. 2. Research recruiters were researchers themselves, not HR people. 3. Recruiting was for quality hires, not for particular jobs; complementary talent was valued. 4. Whom a candidate met on site was determined after s/he gave a seminar; this promoted good matchups. 5. Researchers decided for themselves what to work on--either self- generated or an interesting problem from elsewhere in the company. 6. If you needed to know something in most any field, you could usually find a willing expert to get you on track to an answer. 7. Annual merit review was collegial. No one lost out because of unlucky draw of a supervisor. 8. Collegiality in fact beat that of any faculty I know. Office doors were always open; new arrivals needed only to do good work, not to chase tenure. This culture grew from the grand original idea of the Labs: R&D for the whole of AT&T funded by the whole of AT&T, with a long time horizon. I joined thinking the Labs was good seasoning for academia. The culture held me for 39 years. The premise was viable in the days of regulated monopoly. It has been greatly watered down since. Doug

6 years, 6 months

stories

by Larry McVoy

Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their way to Bell Labs? When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of the center of the Unix universe in my mind). So I wanted to go there and had to work at it a bit but I got there. Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that? If you were a geek was that the place to go? I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of how well known the Labs were back then. So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems - people end up there? --lm

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] DEC compilers (was Happy birthday, John Backus!)

by Norman Wilson

Lars Brinkhoff: There was also NIL, for VMS. Was it ever finished? ==== If so, is there a pointer to it? Norman Wilson Toronto On

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Toby Thain > He made amends by being early to recognise that problem, and propose > solutions, in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture Actually, I'd consider a far bigger amend to be his work on Algol 60 (he was one of the main contributors), which Hoare so memorably described as "a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors". AFAICT, although Algol 60 itself is no longer used, basically _every_ modern programming language (other than wierd, parallel ones, etc) is heavily descended from Algol 60 (e.g. C, via CPL). As for FORTRAN, it's worth recalling that it was originally for the IBM 704, which was their very _first_ commercial computer with core memory! And not a lot of it - early 704's came with a massive 4KW of main memory! So the compiler had to be squeezed into _very_ small space - and it reportedly did an excellent job of emitting efficient code (at a time when a lot of people thought that couldn't be done, and so were hostile to the concept of writing program in HLL). And the compiler had to be written entirely in assembler, to boot... Which brings up an interesting query - I wonder when/what the last compiler written in assembler was? I gather these days compilers for new machines are always bootstrapped as cross-compilers (an X compiler for the Y machine is written in X, run through the X compiler for the [existing] Z machine, and then run though itself, on the Z machine, to produce binary of itself for the Y machine). Noel

6 years, 6 months

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