Re: [TUHS] Ratfor revived!

Thank you, Clem. I am working on getting the tools running in DOSBox, which seemed most straightforward. The Byte article (the scan of which I am very grateful for; not having to go trawling through the stacks at the Oberlin College library is always a plus) claims that the tools have been implemented on: ACOS Amdahl Apollo AN/UYK Burroughs CDC Cray Data General DEC FACOM GEC HP HITAC Honeywell IBM Intel Interdata Modcomp Multics NCR Perkin-Elmer Prime Rolm SEL Tandem Univac Wang Xerox CP/M Machines MS/DOS Machines UNIX Machines Which is quite the list; I've never even heard of a few of those! Based on the files in the UNIX Archive, am I to assume that most of those ports took advantage of a native Pascal compiler? That's how I'm planning to bring the tools up on my local RT-11 machine. -Henry On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 at 19:34, Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote: > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Software_Tools/ > ᐧ > > On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 5:25 PM Henry Bent &lt;henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > >> On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 at 17:17, Deborah Scherrer < >> dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu&gt; wrote: >> >>> All you folks revisiting the Software Tools should remember that there >>> was an entire movement around the first book, based at Lawrence Berkeley >>> Lab. The Software Tools group, an offshoot of Usenix, had about 2000 >>> members. We created an almost-entire Unix environment based on a virtual >>> operating system that we designed, inspired of course by Kernighan's >>> ideas. The collection was ported to over 50 operating systems, including >>> some without file systems. This is all still freely available, and stored >>> with the Unix archives. >>> >> Could you provide a link to said environment, and suggest what sort of >> machines it might have run on? I probably have something here that will do >> it, and I am very interested. >> >> -Henry >> >> >>> On 12/1/21 12:59 PM, Clem Cole wrote: >>> >>> Arnold -- sounds fun. Thank you!!! I'll add it to my growing pile of >>> things I want to play with at some point. I too had a wonderful childhood >>> experience with the SW tools. Somebody had a number of them running on a >>> VMS box when all we had was the VMS Fortran compiler, no C yet. >>> >>> I am curious why did you decide to use byacc? I would have thought in >>> a desire to modernize and make it more available on a modern system -- was >>> there something in byacc that could not be done easily in bison? To be >>> honest, I had thought Robert Corbett did them both and bison was the >>> successor to byacc, but I'm not a compiler guy - so I'm suspecting that >>> there must be a difference/reason. As I said, this is purely curiosity -- >>> an educational opportunity. >>> >>> Thanks again, >>> Clem >>> ᐧ >>> >>> On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 3:41 PM Arnold Robbins &lt;arnold(a)skeeve.com&gt; >>> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi All. >>>> >>>> Mainly for fun (sic), I decided to revive the Ratfor (Rational >>>> Fortran) preprocessor. Please see: >>>> >>>> https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/ratfor >>>> >>>> I started with the V6 code, then added the V7, V8 and V10 versions >>>> on top of it. Each one has its own branch so that you can look >>>> at the original code, if you wish. The man page and the paper from >>>> the V7 manual are also included. >>>> >>>> Starting with the Tenth Edition version, I set about to modernize >>>> the code and get it to compile and run on a modern-day system. >>>> (ANSI style declarations and function headers, modern include files, >>>> use of getopt, and most importantly, correct use of Yacc yyval and >>>> yylval variables.) >>>> >>>> You will need Berkely Yacc installed as byacc in order to build it. >>>> >>>> I have only touch-tested it, but so far it seems OK. 'make' runs in >>>> like 2 >>>> seconds, really quick. On my Ubuntu Linux systems, it compiles with >>>> no warnings. >>>> >>>> I hope to eventually add a test suite also, if I can steal some time. >>>> >>>> Before anyone asks, no, I don't think anybody today has any real use >>>> for it. This was simply "for fun", and because Ratfor has a soft >>>> spot in my heart. "Software Tools" was, for me, the most influential >>>> programming book that I ever read. I don't think there's a better >>>> book to convey the "zen" of Unix. >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> >>>> Arnold >>>> >>>