TUHS

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6536 discussions

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, 10 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, 10 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, 10 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, 10 months

Ideal

by Noel Hunt

Doug McIlroy's mentioning `ideal' prompts me to ask something I've long wanted to ask. The only use I ever saw of ideal was in Peter Weinberger's memo about his C B-tree package. Was ideal used for anything other than that? Noel Hunt

7 years, 10 months

CSTR files

by Aharon Robbins

Hi All. I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could file: http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz. It's just under ten megs. Warren, can we get this into the archives? Thanks, Arnold

7 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] CSTR files

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arthur Krewat > That's not RUNOFF on TOPS-10 (or one it's predecessors) is it? No, RUNOFF on CTSS - _much_ earlier - CTSS RUNOFF was in '64, which was the year the PDP-6 came out. Noel

7 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] CSTR files

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Labovitz > I found the earliest succession of roff predecessors went something like this: > TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff Did you manage to find out from Jerry if he knew of/anything about TJ2 when he did RUNOFF? Noel

7 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] arithmetic IF (was origin of string.h and ctype.h)

by Paul McJones

On Aug 17, 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > I remember reading an article somewhere on the history of the first > FORTRAN compiler. The guys doing it wanted it to succeed, and they > were fighting the mentality that high level languages could not possibly > be as efficient as hand-coded assembly, so they put a lot of work into > the optimization of the generated code. > > It worked so well that the results that came out of the compiler > sometimes suprised the compiler writers! They then would have to > dive into the compiler sources to figure out how it was done. > > I don't remember where I read this article. If the story rings a > bell with anyone, let me know. In his paper "The history of FORTRAN I, II and III” presented at the First ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of Programming Languages (1978), John Backus said: > It was an exciting period; when later on we began to get fragments of compiled programs out of the system, we were often astonished at the surprising transformations in the indexing operations and in the arrangement of the computation which the compiler made, changes which made the object program efficient but which we would not have thought to make as programmers ourselves (even though, of course, Nelson or Ziller could figure out how the indexing worked, Sheridan could explain how an expresssion had been optimized beyond recognition, and Goldberg or Sayre could tell us how section 5 had generated additional indexing operations). Transfers of control appeared which corresponded to no source statement, expressions were radically rearranged, and the same DO statement might produce no instructions in the object program in one context, and in another it would produce many instructions in different places in the program. The paper is available here, courtesy of ACM: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/index.html .

7 years, 11 months

CSTR 122 on CHEM?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Does anyone have this, even just in PostScript? Thanks, Arnold P.S. Chem itself is at http://www.netlib.org/typesetting/chem.

7 years, 11 months

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