TUHS

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6418 discussions

by Dave Horsfall

My DuckDuckGo-fu appears to be on the blink (and I refuse to use Google out of privacy concerns); is there a PDF/PS/groff somewhere? I don't use fancy-wanky markup languages. Thanks. -- Dave

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Looking for final C compiler by Dennis Ritchie

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Thank you for the info - I will certainly look at the USENIX tapes. > > I will try to port the C compiler to amd64 - while preserving as much of > the original code as I can. But not sure if this is even feasible. > > Thanks and Regards > Dibyendu If that is your goal, you might want to start with the version included with 2.11BSD. It is essentially the same as the version from V7, but with 15 more years of bug fixes. I used that source to port V6 Unix to the TI990 architecture back in 2014/2015 and the good thing about it is that it still compiles with a modern gcc. For your project, I think you would be able to use the first pass ‘c0’ almost unchanged. The second pass ‘c1’ would need major restructuring. It mainly builds a tree for each expression and then performs various transformations, many of which are PDP11 specific (but also portable ones, like handling of constant expressions). It then covers the tree with code fragments selected from a library. This library (‘optable') would need a full rewrite as well. The last pass ‘c2’ is the optimiser and is also highly PDP11 specific. It reads the assembler output of ‘c1’ function by function, building an instruction list. It then performs some portable optimisations (eliminating unnecessary jumps, etc.) and also more PDP11 specific optimisations (the most complex being removing redundant register loads - the concept of which would be reusable). There are about 12,000 lines of code and as a rough guess I would say that some 40% needs rewriting. A new code fragment library would probably be some 2 to 3 thousand lines. I recall reading about a project to revive the Ritchie C compiler one or two years ago, but a quick web search came up dry. Anybody else remember reading that?

6 years, 5 months

Frank Heart, Who Helped to Design the ArpaNet IMPs at BBN Dies at 89

by Clem Cole

Note the NY Times head lines this as 'pre-Internet' which is a little sad, but what can you do: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/technology/frank-heart- who-linked-computers-before-the-internet-dies-at-89.html

6 years, 6 months

Doug McIlroy's C++ regular expression library (mostly) revived

by Arnold Robbins

Hi All. I have (mostly) revived Doug McIlroy's C++ regular expression parsing library. I gratefully acknowledge and thank him for allowing me to publish the code and for his help in finding all the bits and pieces. It's available at https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/mcilroy-regex . The main things I've done are to gather all the bits and pieces, rename files to have a .cpp extension, and get everything to compile using current g++ and standard make. I'm at the point where I could use some help. The various tests do not all run successfully. 1. make retest - a number of tests fail 2. ./tesgrep.sh - a number of tests fail 3. ./testsed.sh - tests fail with core dumps Looking briefly, some of the code in sed plays C games, casting various things arouond to pointers of different types and dereferencing them; these things tend to cause trouble in C++. I'm hopeful that more eyes on this code will help it come back to life more quickly. Any and all help will be appreciated. Thanks, Arnold P.S. Let's not start a flame war about C vs. C++ etc. etc. If you can help, please just dive in. Otherwise, just go, "wow, neat work" and move on to something else. :-) Thanks.

6 years, 6 months

Speaking commands [Was: Bell System Technical Journal archive]

by Nemo

On 15/07/2018, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote (in part): > Also: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk > > Where GREP Came From - Computerphile (with Brian Kernighan) I was intrigued by BMK's comment that "ed" was never spokend as "ed" by "those in the know", which leads me to wonder how things were spoken. Here is a litte list of how I pronounce things [with others' versions in brackets]. Others will no doubt be aghast. ls - "list" sometimes "l s"; rm - "remove"; chmod - "change mode" [but I have heard "ch-mode"] ar - "archive" [others have said "arrr"] N.

6 years, 6 months

Looking for final C compiler by Dennis Ritchie

by Dibyendu Majumdar

Hi I am interested in finding out if the last C compiler code (not the earliest versions which I know are available) written by Dennis Ritchie is available somewhere. I assume that the C compiler in V7 code was written by him? Thanks and Regards Dibyendu

6 years, 6 months

grep

by Paul Winalski

On 7/18/18, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > The famous exception is grep, which became a verb. I think the similarity to "grab" and "grope" helped. > "grep for" and "grep out". "grep for" I'm familiar with. What does it mean to "grep out"? -Paul W.

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 12

by Doug McIlroy

Arnold was clerly on the Unix Room wavelength. ^All those two-letter commands were spelled out in conversation, even m-v. The pronunciation of rmdir was hybrid: r-m-dir. But when one talked about an action--not a command per se--verbs would be used: move or copy a file, list a directory. The famous exception is grep, which became a verb. There was no snappy ready-made verb that covered all the aspects of its use: search for mentions in one file, find files that mention, look for patterns, filter data, check for malformed data, ... The verb had two idiomatic variants, "grep for" and "grep out". Doug

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Any Good dmr Anecdotes?

by Hendrik Jan Thomassen

Several decades ago, Jim Joyce of San Francisco was one of the more colorful chaps in the UNIX scene. Among other ventures he had "The Independent UNIX Bookstore", and during Usenix conferences he would rent a nearby hotel suite to sell his books to the conference attendants. Jim once told me the following story (yes, the topic is about dmr anecdotes). One day a young man came to the hotel suite and asked, in a somewhat exaggerated voice, "the best book to learn C programming". Jim pointed at a gentleman in a nearby armchair, reading, and said: "ask that gentleman because he knows everything there is to know about C". So the young man approached said gentleman, and repeated his question. The answer he got was: "Sorry, I can't help you, because I never had to learn C". Which left the young man flabbergasted. -- Hendrik-Jan Thomassen <hjt(a)ATComputing.nl> AT Computing Linux opleiders & consultants Kerkenbos 1238 Tel +31 24 352 72 82 6546 BE Nijmegen www.atcomputing.nl 'If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.'

6 years, 6 months

Bell System Technical Journal archive

by Warren Toomey

https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives (just saw this). Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk Where GREP Came From - Computerphile (with Brian Kernighan) Cheers, Warren

6 years, 6 months

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