Re: [TUHS] long lived programs

Steve Johnson: But in this case, part of the requirement was to pass some standard simulation tests (in FORTRAN, of course). He was complaining that these programs had bugs and didn't give the right answer. ==== This reminds me of an episode during my time at Bell Labs. The System V folks wanted to make pipes that were streams; our experience in Research showed that that was useful. We'd done it just by making pipe(2) create a stream. This caused some subtle differences in semantics (pipes became full-duplex; writing to a pipe put a delimiter in the stream, so that a corresponding read on the other end would stop at the delimiter; write(pipefd, "", 0) therefore generated something that would make read(pipeotherfd, buf, len) return 0). We'd been running all our systems that way for a while, and had uncovered no serious problems. But the System V folks were very nervous about it anyway, and wrote a planning document in which they proposed to create a new, different system call to make stream pipes. pipe(2) would make an old-fashioned pipe; spipe(2) (or whatever it was called, I forget the name) had to be called to get a stream. The document didn't really explain the justification for this. To us in Research it just sounded crazy. Someone else was going to attend a meeting with the developers, but at the last minute he had a conflict, so he drafted me to go. Although I can be pretty blunt in writing, I try not to be so much so in person when dealing with people I don't know; so rather than asking how they could be so crazy as to add a new kind of pipe, I asked why they really thought it necessary. It took a little probing, but the answer turned out to be that their management insisted that everything pass an official verification suite to prove compliance with the System V, Consider It Standard; and said verification suite didn't just check that the first file descriptor returned by pipe(2) could be read and the second written, it insisted that the first could not be written and the second not read. Full-duplex pipes didn't meet the standard, it was claimed. I asked what exactly is the standard? The SVID, I was told. What does the SVID really say, I wondered? We got a copy and looked up pipe(2). According to the official standard, the first file descriptor must be readable and the second writeable, but there was no statement that it couldn't work the other way too. Full-duplex pipes did in fact meet the standard; it was the verification suite that, in an excess of zeal, didn't conform. The developers were absolutely delighted with this. They too thought it was stupid to have two different kinds of pipes, particularly given our experience that full-duplex delimited pipes didn't break anything. They were very happy to have Research not just yell at them for doing things differently from us, but help them figure out how to justify doing things right. I don't know just how they took this further with management, but as it came out in SVr4, pipe(2) returned a full-duplex stream. This is still true even unto Solaris 10, where I just tested it. I made friends that day. That developer group kept in touch with me as they did further work on pipes, the terminal driver, pseudo-ttys, and other things. I didn't agree with everything they did, but we were able to discuss it all cordially. Sometimes the verification program just needs to be fixed. And sometimes the developers that seem set on doing the wrong thing really want help in subverting whatever is forcing that on them, because they really do know what the right thing is. Norman Wilson Toronto ON