Re: [TUHS] Ratfor revived!

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 >>> >>