As has been explained, void came from Algol 68 via Steve Bourne.
As no object could be declared void, void* was a useless
construct. A kind of variable that could point to any object
was required to state the type of useful functions like qsort.
To avoid proliferation of keywords, the useless void* was
pressed into service. I do not remember who suggested that.
Doug
> From: Clem Cole
> typing hard started to become more important in the kernel.
I can imagine! The V6 kernel had all sorts of, ah, 'unusual' typing - as I
learned to my cost when I did that hack version of 'splice()' (to allow a
process in a pipline to drop out, and join the two pipes together directly),
which I did in V6 (my familiar kernel haunt).
Since a lot of code does pointer math to generate wait 'channel' numbers,
e.g.:
sleep(ip+2, PPIPE);
when I naively (out of habit) tried to declare my pointers to be the correct
type, the math didn't work any more! ('ip', in this particular case, was
declared to be an 'int *'.)
No doubt part of this was inherited from older versions (of the system, and
C); the code was working, and there was no call to tweak it. The lack of
casts/coercion in the V6 C compiler may have been an issue, too - I had to do
some equally odd things to make my splice() code work!
Noel
This caught my attention. Did early C really have min and max? Were they used for anything? In those days I was a BCPL user, which IIRC, did not have such things.
-Larry
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Leo Broukhis <leob(a)mailcom.com>
> Subject: [Simh] An abandoned piece of K&R C
> Date: 2017, November 3 at 1:14:42 AM EDT
> To: "simh(a)trailing-edge.com" <simh(a)trailing-edge.com>
>
> https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/4965/4025 <https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/4965/4025>
>
> In the UNIX V7 version of the C language, there were the /\ (min) and the \/ (max) operators. In the source of the scanner part of the compiler,
>
> case BSLASH:
> if (subseq('/', 0, 1))
> return(MAX);
> goto unkn;
>
> case DIVIDE:
> if (subseq('\\', 0, 1))
> return(MIN);
> ...
>
> However, attempting to use them reveals that the corresponding part in the code generator is missing. Trying to compile
>
> foo(a, b) { return a \/ b; }
>
> results in
>
> 1: No code table for op: \/
>
> The scanner piece survived in the copies of the compiler for various systems for several years. I tried to look for copies of the code generator table which would contain an implementation, but failed. Has anyone ever seen a working MIN/MAX operator in K&R C?
>
> Thanks,Leo
>
> _______________________________________________
> Simh mailing list
> Simh(a)trailing-edge.com
> http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Am I the only one having trouble? I mirror the site, and I'm now seeing:
aneurin# tuhs
+ rsync -avz minnie.tuhs.org::UA_Root .
rsync: failed to connect to minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53): Operation timed out (60)
rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(125) [Receiver=3.1.2]
+ rsync -avz minnie.tuhs.org::UA_Applications Applications
rsync: failed to connect to minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53): Operation timed out (60)
rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(125) [Receiver=3.1.2]
Etc.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on Tue Nov 5 00:53:20
1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch) -- Andy Tannenbaum.
(Yeah, an American billion, not the old British one.)
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 89 13:37 CDT
From: Chris Garrigues <7thSon(a)slcs.slb.com>
Subject: A quote from Interop '89
To: unix-haters(a)ai.ai.mit.edu
Cc: 7thSon(a)slcs.slb.com
"We all know that the Internet is Unix. We proved that last
November."
- David Mills, October 2, 1989
> From: Arnold Skeeve
> I suspect that he was also still young and fired up about things. :-)
> ...
> (In other words, he too probably deserves to be cut some slack.)
Much as RTM was cut some slack?
The thing is there's a key difference. RTM didn't _intend_ to melt down the
network, whereas Gene presumbly - hopefully - thought about it for a while
before he made his call to inflict severe punishment.
Did RTM do something wrong? Absolutely. Did he deserve some punishment?
Definitely. But years in jail? Yes, it caused a lot of disruption - but to any
one person, not an overwhelming amount.
Luckily, the judge was wise enough, and brave enough, to put the sentencing
guidelines (and the DoJ recommendation, IIRC) to one side.
However, that too was not without a cost; it was one more stone added to what
is admittedlyalready a mountain of precedent that judges can ignore the
legislature's recommendations - and once one does it, another will feel more
free to do so. And so we pass from a government of laws to a government of
men.
But I don't give Gene the lion's share of the blame: that has to go to Rasch,
and his superiors at the DoJ, who were apparently (as best I can understand
their motives) willing to crush a young man under a bus to make a point. The
power to prosecute and punish is an awesome one, and should be wielded
carefully and with judgement, and it was their failure to do so that really
was the root cause.
Noel
I think "classlessness" is intened as an antonym to "classy".
Spafford with high dudgeon called early for punishment. He had tempered
it somewhat by the time he wrote his CACM article, published in June
1985. But still some animus shows through, in "even-handedly"
speculating about whether the worm was intended as a lark or as
something nefarious. He evidently had mellowed a lot by the
time of the last quotation below.
In the CACM article Spaff quoted someone else as suggesting that
Morris did it to impress Jodie Foster, and he called Allman's
back door in Sendmail a debugging feature that people could
optionally turn off. As far as I know it was not disclosed that
DEBUG allowed remote control of Sendmail. In fact Sendmail was
so opaque that Dave Presotto declined to install it and wrote
his own (upas) for Research.
I don't recall the cited "contest". And Dennis's reaction to
the CaCM article seems somwhat harsh. But the context is that
Spafford's overheated initial reaction did not win friends in
research.
>
> Can anyone remember or decipher what this was about???
>
> Date: 24 Mar 90 06:52:43 GMT
> From: dmr(a)alice.att.com
> Subject: Re: Contest announcement
> To: misc-security(a)uunet.uu.net
>
> My own contest is "Most appalling display of classlessness in dealing with
> a serious subject." The nominees are:
>
> 1) National Center for Computer Crime Data, Security Magazine, and
> Gene Spafford, for their "How High Shall We Hang Robert Morris?"
> contest.
>
> 2) Gene Spafford, for the most tasteless article ever to appear in CACM
> (special credits for the Jodie Foster joke).
>
> Dennis Ritchie
>
> Some context maybe?
>>
>> “He has not tried to make any money or work in this area,” Purdue
>> University computer science professor Eugene Spafford said of Morris
>> in an interview with The Washington Post. “His behavior has been
>> consistent in supporting his defense: that it was an accident and he
>> felt badly about it. I think it’s very much to his credit that that has
>> been his behavior ever since.”
Arnold:
> OK, that I can understand. It's ages since I played with
> readline, but I think you can preload the buffer it works on
> (bash does that, no?) so ed + readline could be made to work
> that way.
====
Or, if you have moved beyond the era of simulated glass
teletypes on graphics screens, you could do the editing
in the terminal (program).
It's a real shame the mux/9term way of doing things never
caught on. I suppose it is because so many people are
wedded to programs that require cursor addressing; I'm
glad I never succumbed to that.
I use ed (or its cousin qed a la Toronto) for simple stuff.
Mostly I'll use the traditional commands, but sometimes
I will, in mux/9term style, print a line with p, type
c, edit the line on the screen, pick it up and send it,
type . return.
And of course I can do that sort of thing with any program,
whether or not it is compiled with some magic library.
All this is something of a matter of taste, but I have
sometimes amazed (in a good way) my colleagues with it.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
