29 Jan
2022
29 Jan
'22
5:31 a.m.
On 1/28/22 5:18 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:09 PM Will Senn
<will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm reading in, Kernighan & Plauger's 1981 edition of Software
Tools in Pascal and in the book, the author's mention Bill Joy's
Pascal and Andy Tanenbaum's as being rock solid. So, a few related
questions:
1. What edition of UNIX were they likely to be using?
I'm afraid I can't speak to your 2nd and 3rd questions, but I can
offer what I think is a reasonable guess about the first.
One of the neat things about Unix and Unix-adjacent books of that era
is that very often the copyright page held some information about the
production of the book itself. I just so happened to have a copy of,
"Software Tools in Pascal" sitting on my desk, and it says, "This
books as set in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using a
Mergenthaler Linotron 202 phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70
running the Unix operating system."
Given the PDP-11 and the date (1981) one may reasonably conclude that
it was running 7th Edition. I imagine the pascal was Joy's, from Berkeley.
- Dan C.
Great hint. 20 seconds after I hit send on the original email, I came
across this:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
Where Brian Kernighan talks about the challenges they faced porting the
ratfor examples into pascal. He explains that:
The programs were first written in that dialect of Pascal supported
by the Pascal interpreter pi provided by the University of
California at Berkeley. The language is close to the nominal
standard of Jensen and Wirth,(6
<http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html#lit-6>) with good
diagnostics and careful run-time checking. Since then, the programs
have also been run, unchanged except for new libraries of
primitives, on four other systems: an interpreter from the Free
University of Amsterdam (hereinafter referred to as VU, for Vrije
Universiteit), a VAX version of the Berkeley system (a true
compiler), a compiler purveyed by Whitesmiths, Ltd., and UCSD Pascal
on a Z80. All but the last of these Pascal systems are written in C.
So, you were right about it being Joy's pi.
Thanks,
Will