On 2016-07-10 02:52, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit:
>> > "Die Segel streichen" (Taking in the sails),
> "Striking the sails" in technical English. All the nations around the
> North and Baltic Seas exchanged their vocabularies like diseases, and if
> we didn't have records of their earlier histories, we would know they
> were related but we'd never figure out exactly how. For example, it
> can be shown that French bateau, German Boot, common Scandinavian båt,
> Irish bád, Scottish Gaelic bà ta, Scots boat, and the equivalents in
> the various Frisian languages are none of them original native words:
> they all were borrowed from English boat.
Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which means
they all share a common root.
What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from English? I
would guess/suspect that the term is older than English itself, and the
similarity of the word in the different languages comes from the fact
that it's old enough to have been around when all these languages were
closer to the roots and each other. Boats have been around for much
longer than the English language so I would suspect some term for them
have been around for a long time too...
If you ask me, you all got most terms from the Vikings anyway, who were
the first good seafarers... :-)
(I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
Steffen Nurpmeso:
...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
created what became POSIX preferred slash instead -- i hope it is
not the proud of high skills in using (maybe light) sabers that
some people of the engineer community seem to foster. But it
could be the sober truth. Or, it could be a bug caused by
inconsideration. And that seems very likely now.
====
It had nothing to do with engineers. `Slash' for / has been
conventional American usage for as long as I can remember,
dating back well before POSIX or UNIX or the movie that made
a meme of light sabers.
It's unclear exactly how far back it dates. The earliest
OED citation for `slash' as `A thin sloping line, thus /'
is dated 1961; but the cite is from Webster's 3rd.
Given the amount of violence prevalent in American metaphor,
it is hardly noteworthy.
Make American Language Violent Again (and I HATE MOSQUITOS*).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
* If you don't know what this refers to, you probably don't
want to know.
On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote:
> ...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
> created what became POSIX preferred slash instead
>
​I can not speak for anyone else. But at the time when I was a part of
the /usr/group UNIX standards** mtgs I personally do not believe I had
ever heard of the term "​solidus." Such a term maybe had been used in my
first form Latin classes from the 1960s, but by the 1980s I had long ago
forgotten any/all of my Latin. I certainly did not try to remember it as a
computer professional.
In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to the
asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang" from the sound
made by them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from the console
TTY. But slash was what we called the character that is now next to the
shift key on modern keyboards. I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry. Although interestingly
enough, the vertical bar or UNIX "pipe" symbol was used and discussed
freely in those days. I find it interesting that Redmond-ism became the
unshifted character, not the vertical bar by the shear force of economics
of the PC.
Clem
** For those that do not know (my apologies to those that do) the 1985
/usr/group standards committee was the forerunner to IEEE P1003. Which we
published as the first "official UNIX API standard agreed by the community"
(I still have a hardcopy). But neither /usr/group nor USENIX had the
political authority to bring an official standard to FIPS, ANSI, ECMA, ISO
or like, while IEEE did. So a few months before the last meeting, Jim
Issak petitioned IEEE for standards status, and the last meeting of the
/usr/group UNIX standards meeting was very short -- about 10 minutes. We
voted to disband and then everyone in the room officially reformed a few
minutes later all signing in as IEEE P1003, later to be called POSIX. For
further historical note, I was a "founding member" of both groups and the
editor of a number of early drafts (numbers 5-11 IIRC), as well as the
primary author of the Tape Format and Terminal I/O sections of P1003.1.
With Keith Bostic, I would later be part of the P1003.2 and pen the
original PAX compromise. After that whole mess I was so disgusted with the
politics of the effort, I stopping going to the POSIX mtgs.
PPS While I did not work for them at the time, you can blame DEC for the
mess with the case/character sets in the POSIX & FIPS standards. A number
of the compromises in the standard documents were forced by VMS, 7-bit
(case insensitivity) being the prime one. While we did get in the
rational section of document that it was suggested/advised that systems
implementations and applications code be case insensitive and 8 bit clean
so that other character sets could be supported. However the DEC folks
were firmly against anything more than 7-bit ASCII and supporting anything
in that character set. My memory is that the IBM folks were silent at the
time and just let the DEC guys carry the torch for 1960's 7-bit US English.
Thanks for reminding me about that one, Clem. I think I even have
Darnell's book somewhere.
I haven't decided what to do about batch interpreters for C. They aren't
interactive but there is still some overlap of concerns. I'll probably
post a list of them somewhere. I also have Al Stevens' Quincy,
Przemyslaw Podsiadly's SeeR, and Herb Schildt's from "Building your own
C interpreter."
On Wed, Jul 6, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> From the The Unix Historical Society mailing list, I discovered your
> historical interest in C interpreters. It looks like you are missing at
> least one, so I though I would introduce you all.
>
> Paul/Wendell meet Peter Darnell -- Pete wrote one an early C interpreter
> for his C programming book. I'll leave it to you folks to discuss what
> he
> did, its current status et al.
>
> Best Wishes,
>
> Clem Cole (old time UNIX and C guy)
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> Date: Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 6:01 PM
> Subject: [TUHS] Interactive C Environments
> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org
>
>
> All, I've been asked by Wendell to forward this query about C
> interpreters to the mailing list for him.
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Wendell P <wendellp(a)operamail.com> -----
>
> I have a project at softwarepreservation.org to collect work done,
> mostly in the 1970s and 80s, on C interpreters.
>
> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c
>
> One thing I'm trying to track down is Cin, the C interpreter in UNIX
> v10. I found the man page online and the tutorial in v2 of the Saunders
> book, but that's it. Can anyone help me to find files or docs?
>
> BTW, if you have anything related to the other commercial systems
> listed, I'd like to hear. I've found that in nearly all cases, the
> original developers did not keep the files or papers.
>
> Cheers,
> Wendell
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
--
http://www.fastmail.com - The professional email service
Clem Cole:
I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry.
=====
Oh, come on. You programmed in C. You probably used
UNIX back when @ was the default kill character (though
I doubt you're odd enough still to use that kill character,
as I do). You surely used troff, LaTeX, or both, and have
doubtless sworn at regular expressions more often than
most of the young Linux crowd have had chocolate bars.
I think you've just forgotten it out of PBSD (post-backlash
stress disorder, nothing to do with Berkeley).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
UNIX\(tm old fart who swore at a regexp just yesterday
Greg Lehey:
And why? Yes, the 8088 was a reasonably fast processor, so fast that
they could slow it down a little so that they could use the same
crystal to create the clock both for the CPU and the USART. But the
base system had only 16 kB memory, only a little more than half the
size of the 6th Edition kernel. Even without the issue of disks
(which could potentially have been worked around) it really wasn't big
enough for a multiprogramming OS.
=====
Those who remember the earliest UNIX (even if few of us have
used it) might disagree with that. Neither the PDP-7 nor the
PDP-11/20 on which UNIX was born had memory management: a
context switch was a swap. That would have been pretty slow
on floppies, so perhaps it wouldn't have been saleable, but
it was certainly possible.
In fact Heinz Lycklama revived the idea in the V6 era to
create LSX, a UNIX for the early LSI-11 which had no
memory management and a single ca. 300kiB floppy drive.
It had more memory than the 8088 system, though: 20kiW,
i.e. 40kiB. Even so, Lycklama did quite a bit of work to
squeeze the kernel down, reduce the number of processes
and context switches, and so on.
Here's a link to one of his papers on the system:
https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1977/5085/00/50850237.pdf
I suspect it would have been possible to make a XENIX
that would have worked on that hardware. Whether it
would have worked well enough to sell is another question.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
All, I've been working with Peter Salus (author of A Quarter Century of Unix)
to get the book published as an e-book. However, the current publishers have
been very incommunicative.
Given that the potential readership may be small, Peter has suggested this:
> I think (a) just putting the bits somewhere where they could
> be sucked up would be fine; and (b) let folks make donations
> to TUHS as payment.
However, as with all the Unix stuff, I'm still concerned about copyright
issues. So this is what I'm going to do. You will find a collection of
bits at this URL: http://minnie.tuhs.org/Z3/QCU/qcu.epub
In 24 hours I'll remove the link. After that, you can "do a Lions" on
the bits. I did the scanning, OCR'ing and proofing, so if you spot any
mistakes, let me know.
I'm not really interested in any payment for either the book or TUHS
itself. However, if you do feel generous, my e-mail address is also
my PayPal account.
Cheers, Warren
Thanks, Warren, for the (brief) posting of the ePub file for Peter
Salus' fine book, A Quarter Century of Unix.
I have a printed copy of that book on my shelf, and here is a list of
the errata that I found in it when I read it in 2004 that might also
be present in the ePub version:
p. 23, line 7:
deveoloped -> developed
p. 111, line 5:
Dave Nowitz we'd do -> Dave Nowitz said we'd do
p. 142, line 7:
collaboaration -> collaboration
p. 144, line -4 (i.e., 4 from bottom):
reimplemeted -> reimplemented
p. 160, line 10:
the the only -> the only
p. 196, line 17:
develope JUNET -> develop JUNET
p. 221, running header:
Berkley -> Berkeley
p. 222, line 11:
Mellon Institue -> Mellon Institute
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Since a few people here are Bell Labs veterans, I'd to ask if someone
can explain a bit about that place. Sometimes I hear about work done
there that I'd like to follow up on, but I have no idea where to start.
For starters, I assume that everybody had to write up periodical reports
on their work. Was that stuff archived and is it still accessible
someplace? What about software that got to the point that it actually
had users beyond the developers? I know that major commercial projects
like UNIX are tied up in licensing limbo, but does that apply to
absolutely everything made there?
There is the AT&T Archives and History Center in Warren, NJ. Is it worth
asking if they have old tech reports?
--
http://www.fastmail.com - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again
Steve Bourne tried hard to interest us in A68, and I personally liked some
features of it (especially the automatic type morphing of arguments into
the expected types). But the documentation was a huge barrier--all the
familiar ideas were given completely new (and unintuitive) names, making
it very difficult to get into.
I may be biased in my view, but I think one fatal mistake that A68 made
was that it had no scheme for porting the language to the plethora of
computers and systems around at that time. (The Bliss language from CMU
had a similar problem, requiring a bigger computer to compile for the
PDP-11). Pascal had P-code, and gave C a real run, especially as a
teaching language. C had PCC.
Nowadays, newer languages like Python just piggyback on C or C++...
