9 Sep
2022
9 Sep
'22
6:52 a.m.
On Thu, 8 Sep 2022, Larry McVoy wrote:
I'm not actually that good a programmer. Step me through an algo, I can
probably interpret that as C, BASIC, 6502 ASM or 8086 ASM - but whether I
can implement it from just an explanation, that's hit or miss.
Frequently I come up with stupid ideas that I think are beyond me, and
often I'm right. Once in a while they're not, and I'm able to actually
implement something. 😜
Stuff like diff or sccs might be easy for some people here - but I've
spent months wracking my brain on things I think are simpler (6502 CPU
core for example - which is why for 20 years I used others' cores) and
been fruitless.
-uso.
On Thu, Sep 08, 2022 at 08:05:44PM -0400, Steve
Nickolas wrote:
Wasn't so much about 32V itself, as 32V being potentially clear and the
source for a lot of SysV, that having 32V would make rewriting SysV a lot
easier. 🤪
I've used v7/386, which is probably a comparable system.
I'm probably the only one brazen enough to put it to the test.
For some years, I've wanted to create a free implementation of System V, and
then move on from there. (I know there's limited utility for such a thing,
because of the BSDs.)
Why? Have you booted 32V? Run in it for a while? No VM, no networking,
very basic system. Other than historical, I don't understand the point.
A few things
actually hinge on this. If it were considered a fact, and not
a mere opinion, that 32V was PD, then I could be sure that certain things
were safe to use, rather than having to rewrite (including some particularly
tricky stuff the BSDs never fully reimplemented, like diff(1)).
I'm a source management guy, I've written a couple of systems. I live and
breath diff and diff(1) is not in the slightest way hard. I wrote my own
version of SCCS in a way that you could get as many different versions of
the history as you wanted in one pass. That's a lot harder than diff(1).
But maybe I don't understand what you think is tricky about diff, you
may have some insight I'm missing, care to share?