19 Apr
2019
19 Apr
'19
5:57 p.m.
Amusing thing on parsers. I had written a short C subroutine to eat HOSTS.TXT directly
which we used rather than the Berkeley /etc/hosts format.
It presented the same interface to the caller as the Berkeley one.
We found out that when we added a host with a type "68000" that we suddenly
broke every straight BSD system. Apparently, they used a YACC grammar to parse HOSTS.TXT
into /etc/hosts and had screwed it up assuming the machine type field (like the hostname)
had to begin with a letter. It didn't help that the machine we added was named
"BRL-ZAP." There was some discussion that we had done this intentionally.
I pointed out that a YACC grammar was way overkill and there must be some existing file on
UNIX that has fields separated by colons that there was simpler stuff written to parse 😊
Anyhow, for expedience Jake just added an "MC" on to the machine type to
appease the Berkeley toadies.
There was a protocol defined to download the host file which we ran nighly .