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Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed!

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Seek and ye shall find. Ask and ye shall receive. Brian Kernighan was kind enough to find for me everyone's favorite Computing Sceince Technical Report, CSTR 100, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language". Attached is the file and his macros. This will not immediately format using groff etc.; I hope to create a version that will, sometime in the next few weeks. In the meantime, Warren, please add to the archives when you are able. Enjoy! Arnold

7 years, 7 months

Follow-on to the Pascal/C/etc. discussion

by Jon Steinhart

Hi everybody. I'm new to this list as a side-effect of my question about the provenance of strcmp and the convention of returning <0, 0, >0. I had to learn Pascal as a freshman in college which was challenging coming from BTL knowing C. Kept wondering how Pascal could be used for anything useful. The answer that I later saw in industry was "by adding non-standard extensions". Language discussions often turn to the issue of whether programming languages should prevent programmers from making mistakes or whether that's the job of the programmer. This is, of course, independent of discussing the expressiveness of languages. I agree that a lot of "programming" today consists of trusting and bolting together random library functions. That's not me; I often work on safety critical devices and I'm not going to rely on libraries of unknown provenance when building a medical device that I make be hooked up to it someday. Years ago I inherited a project written in hodgepodge of programming languages including ruby. My first reaction to ruby was "Wow, how do I get some of what they're smoking because it's better than anything I have?" I eventually asked Ward Cunningham about it because he was working for ruby house AboutUs at the time. His answer went something like this: Jon, you're an engineer and you understand engineering. You know programming and programmers and understand programming. Then, there are the people with whom we entrust our confidential credit card data. That's what ruby is for. This nicely summarized the current state of affairs in which the most critical tasks are assigned to the least competent people. I see this as a management, business, and political problem which can't be solved by different languages. I have often made the statement that "I would never hire someone who had to use glibc in order to implement a singly-linked list." I get push-back such as "Oh, and people can create bugs rather than using the debugged library?" to which I glibly respond "debugged library like OpenSSL?" I am more than a little terrified by the "everybody must learn to code in high school movement". What they're learning is something at a level akin to the ruby example above. The goal is clearly to make "coding" a minimum wage job and to many the distinction between "coding" and engineering is lost. I've spoken with many kids in the "future engineer" category who are frustrated at the lack of depth in the curriculum. I'd summarize it as teaching people to program without teaching them anything about computers. Anyway, I have been volunteering to teach technology to kids for years as karmic payback to my BTL explorer scout advisors Carl Christensen, Heinz Lycklama, and Hans Lie. Not to mention all of the amazing people that I met there when my dedication to hitchhiking up the the Labs after school and talking people into signing me in turned into a series of summer jobs. I'm in the process of turning my class notes into a book. The goal of the book is to teach kids enough about computers that they can understand what their code is actually doing and why one can write better code with an understanding of the hardware and environment. The book is in the editing phase so it's beyond wholesale changes. But I'm curious as to what you all think should be in such a book as I'll find a way to wedge in anything important that I missed. Thanks, Jon

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed!

by Diomidis Spinellis

And let's not forget Alan Perlis's: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis -------- Original message -------- From: Toby Thain Date:02/09/2017 18:00 (GMT+02:00) To: Dan Cross Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society , quad Subject: Re: [TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed! ... Finally, a favourite quote: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" -- Hal Abelson https://twitter.com/old_sound/status/903919515884544000 --Toby > > - Dan C. >

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] What was the first edition of UNIX that left AT&T

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Jeremy C. Reed" > I don't know the key for "v" but maybe means "very distant host" Yes. See: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/jpg/ARPANet/L77Dec.jpg and look at the MIT-44 IMP (upper right center). It's listed as having a PDP-11, with the /v, and that machine (LL-ASG, 1/44) was definitely on a VDH (it was not in Tech Sq). (A VDH was basically an IMP modem interface hardware-wise, but made to look like a host at a high level within the IMP software.) > He also told me the Unix v6 Arpanet code was from San Diego. Err, he may have gotten it from San Diego, but they didn't write the code, it was written at UIll. See: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC which contains a copy of the code, which came to me via NOSC in SD. Noel

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] What was the first edition of UNIX that left AT&T

by Clem cole

I did hear back from Lou Katz - user #1. Indeed the first version that escaped the labs was the 4th edition. Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. > On Sep 1, 2017, at 7:16 PM, Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > > Interesting. If O'Malley had a connection wonder what it was connected too on both sides. It had to be to lbl but the Vdh was a piece of shit even in the ingvax days. The first version was even worse. On the ucb side I wonder. It would not have been Unix because UofI did the original arpanet code and that was for v6. There was never a pdp10 at ucb so I wonder if it was one of the CDC machines which were the primary systems until Unix came to be. > > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. > >>> On Sep 1, 2017, at 5:59 PM, Jeremy C. Reed <reed(a)reedmedia.net> wrote: >>> >>> On Fri, 1 Sep 2017, Clem Cole wrote: >>> >>> So it means that UCB was hacking privately without taking to Katz@ NYU, or >>> the Columbia and Harvard folks for a while. I need to ask Lou what he >>> remembers. UCB was not connected to the Arpanet at this point (Stanford >>> was), so it's possible Ken's sabbatical openned up some channels that had >>> not existed. [UCB does not get connected until ing70 gets the >>> vdh-interface up the hill to LBL's IMP as part of the Ingress project and >>> that was very late in the 70s - not long before I arrived]. >> >> Allman told me that Mike O'Malley had an ARPA connection at UCB that was >> axed a few years before the INGRES link. So yes, I think no Arpanet >> connection during the early BSD development work. (Losing this >> connection may have had some controversy, but I don't know the details.) >> >> Fabry told me that O'Malley used Unix for his (EECS) Artificial >> Intelligence research projects before he discovered it (so before the >> October 1973 Symposium). >> >> RFC 402 of Oct 1972 has a ARPA network participant Michael O'Malley of >> University of Michigan Phonetics Laboratory. Also this draft report at >> http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=35… >> about the ARPA speech recognition project lists M. H. O'Malley at UCB >> and says the principle investigator from Univ. of Michigan moved to UCB. >> (I never go ahold of him to see if had any other relevance to my BSD >> story.) >> >>

7 years, 7 months

What was the first edition of UNIX that left AT&T

by Clem Cole

I was recently asked a question that I was not sure the answer, so I thought I would pass it to this group of folks. What was the first edition that actually left Murray Hill and where did it go? My own first encounter was the Fifth edition but I know that was later. I'm pretty sure both Harvard and MIT had it before CMU. I'm thinking Fourth edition went to Harvard and some other places ??NYU?? ??MIT?? Did anything earlier than Fifth ever leave Murray Hill? I don't think UCB or UofI got it until the Sixth edition. I believe there was some earlier commercial site ??CU in NYC maybe?? may have been in there also but I have no idea what version that was. Doug do you know? Warren any ideas? Tx Clem

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language Unearthed!

by Doug McIlroy

> If Unix was written in Pascal I would've happily continued using Pascal! Amusing in the context of Brian's piece, which essentially says if Unix could have been written in Pascal, then Pascal wouldn't have been Pascal. doug\

7 years, 7 months

CSTR 100 now on Github

by Arnold Robbins

Hi All. I have created a Git repo: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/cstr100 I set it up with the original MS macros and a Makefile to create a PDF. THANKS again to Brian Kernighan for finding the document and sharing it. Arnold

7 years, 8 months

Bell Labs history question

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi. For a project I'm working on, I wonder if the Bell Labs alumni present can tell me what was the default group for files for the researchers? That is, what group did ls -l show? In particular, in the late 90s - ~ V10 time frame. Much thanks, Arnold

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] CSTR files

by Doug McIlroy

> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources. > Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc. I have the source for CSTR 155, a trilogy on raster ellipses. It uses interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn. (If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk, doesn't have it.) Doug

7 years, 8 months

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