30 Jan
2022
30 Jan
'22
1:05 a.m.
It would be interesting to know if the S.T. in P. programs will run on
{GNU,Free} Pascal.
On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 7:41 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/28/22 5:31 PM, Will Senn wrote:
On 1/28/22 5:18 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:09 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm reading in, Kernighan &
Plauger's 1981 edition of Software Tools in
Pascal and in the book, the author's mention Bill Joy's Pascal and Andy
Tanenbaum's as being rock solid. So, a few related questions:
1. What edition of UNIX were they likely to be using?
I'm afraid I can't speak to your 2nd and 3rd questions, but I can offer
what I think is a reasonable guess about the first.
One of the neat things about Unix and Unix-adjacent books of that era is
that very often the copyright page held some information about the
production of the book itself. I just so happened to have a copy of,
"Software Tools in Pascal" sitting on my desk, and it says, "This books
as
set in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using a Mergenthaler
Linotron 202 phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 running the Unix
operating system."
Given the PDP-11 and the date (1981) one may reasonably conclude that it
was running 7th Edition. I imagine the pascal was Joy's, from Berkeley.
- Dan C.
Great hint. 20 seconds after I hit send on the original email, I came
across this:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
Where Brian Kernighan talks about the challenges they faced porting the
ratfor examples into pascal. He explains that:
The programs were first written in that dialect of Pascal supported by the
Pascal interpreter pi provided by the University of California at Berkeley. The
language is close to the nominal standard of Jensen and Wirth,(6
<http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html#lit-6>) with good
diagnostics and careful run-time checking. Since then, the programs have
also been run, unchanged except for new libraries of primitives, on four
other systems: an interpreter from the Free University of Amsterdam
(hereinafter referred to as VU, for Vrije Universiteit), a VAX version of
the Berkeley system (a true compiler), a compiler purveyed by Whitesmiths,
Ltd., and UCSD Pascal on a Z80. All but the last of these Pascal systems
are written in C.
So, you were right about it being Joy's pi.
Thanks,
Will
On the good news front, I was able to find a working pi/px environment -
4.2bsd built from tape on simulated vax780 works great (thank god vi works
there, too) and will run the programs in the book without mods, out of the
box. 4.3 would probably work similarly (I put it on the list). I tried
compiling the pascal distributed via 2bsd on v7, but wasn't able to get it
built (story of my life). This is prolly expected because the notes in the
distro say "This is still set up for version 6", so I'll stick with 4.2
for
the time being. Just glad to have a working environment to supplement the
reading.
Will