Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code

I can certainly confirm that Steve Bourne not only knew Algol 68, he was quite an evangelist for it.  When he came to the labs, he got a number of people, including me, to plough through the Algol 68 report, probably the worst written introduction to anything Ive ever read.  They were firmly convinced they were breaking new ground and consequently invented new terms for all kinds of otherwise familiar ideas.  It was as if the report had been written in Esperanto...   There were some very cool ideas, particularly the way the type system worked.  After the simplicity of C, though, we mostly found the syntax to be off-putting.  Also, as I recall, there really was no portability strategy for the language, and I think that held it back, since there were so many different architectures in play at that time.  Languages like C and Pascal, that had implementations that could be easily ported, quickly left non-portable languages like Algol 68 and Bliss in the dust... (Lest I sound like I'm tooting my own horn here, Dennis' PDP-11 C was based on an intermediate language somewhat like P-code, and was in fact ported to a couple of different machines before PCC came along... I learned from the master...) Steve  ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marc Rochkind" <rochkind(a)basepath.com> To: Cc: "The UNIX Historical Society" <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> Sent: Mon, 9 Jan 2017 08:30:58 -0700 Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code Just a quick note about Algol vs. Algol 68: The two are used interchangeably (it seems) in this thread, but they're very different languages, with very different control structures. Someone mentioned he had studied Algol in school, which is plausible. If he in fact studied Algol 68, that's worth a story in its own right! [Whoops... forgot to properly terminate that last sentence.] fi --Marc On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com [1]> wrote: I wasn't directly involved in this, but I do remember Dennis telling me essentially the same story.  I don't recall him mentioning Ken's name, just that "we couldn't use _od_ because that was already taken". Steve B and I had adjacent offices, so I overheard a lot of the discussions about the Bourne shell.  The quoting mechanisms, in particular, got a lot of attention, I think to good end.  There was a lot more thought there than is evident from the surface... Steve (not Bourne) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Norman Wilson" <norman(a)oclsc.org [2]> To: <tuhs(a)tuhs.org [3]> Cc: Sent: Sun, 08 Jan 2017 21:30:03 -0500 Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code Doug McIlroy: There was some pushback which resulted in the strange compromise of if-fi, case-esac, do-done. Alas, the details have slipped from memory. Help, scj? ==== do-od would have required renaming the long-tenured od(1). I remember a tale--possibly chat in the UNIX Room at one point in the latter 1980s--that Steve tried and tried and tried to convince Ken to rename od, in the name of symmetry and elegance. Ken simply said no, as many times as it took. I don't remember who I heard this from; anyone still in touch with Ken who can ask him? Norman Wilson Toronto ON Links: ------ [1] mailto:scj@yaccman.com [2] mailto:norman@oclsc.org [3] mailto:tuhs@tuhs.org