Oh no, the Georgia Tech guys were heavily involved with the Software
Tools stuff at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Were in frequent contact. Did a
superb job of setting up the Tools there and extending them. Good guys!
Debbie
On 12/1/21 11:41 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Indeed.
I never worked with this directly, though. I went to grad school
at Georgia Tech, where some of the students had started with the tools
from the book and built a beautiful Unix-like subsystem on top of
Primos on Pr1me minicomputers. (This code was recoverd in 2019,
after thinking it'd been lost for 30+ years!)
I never asked, but I suspect that the Georgia Tech guys simply didn't
know about the LBL work, or else they developed in parallel.
Arnold
Deborah Scherrer <dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu> 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.
>
> Deborah
>
> 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 <arnold(a)skeeve.com> 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
>>