capturing history of bs(1) command / programming language - TUHS

1 Oct 2019

Hi TUHS folks,

Earlier this month I did a fair bit of research on a little known Unix
programming language - bs - and updated the wikipedia pages
accordingly.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bs_(programming_language)

Thanks for solving some bs mysteries goes to its author, Dick Haight,
as well as those that got us in touch: Doug McIlroy, Brian Kernighan,
and John Mashey.

Apart from what is in the aforementioned wikipedia page, in exchanging
email with me, Dick shared:

q(
I wrote bs at the time Unix (V 3?) and all of the commands were being
converted from assembler to C. So Thompson’s bas became my bs — sort
of. I included snobol’s succeed/fail feature (? Operator/fail return).
[...]

No one asked me to write bs. [...] I tried to get Dennis Ritche to add
something like “? / fail” to C but he didn’t. This is probably part of
why I wrote bs. I wasn’t part of the Unix inner circle (BTL Computing
Research, e.g., Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy, etc). Neither were Mashey
& Dolotta. We were “support”.
)

The Release 3.0 manual (1980) mentions bs prominently on page 9:

   Writing a program. To enter the text of a source program into a
UNIX file, use ed(1). The four principal languages available under
UNIX are C (see cc(1)), Fortran (see f77(1)), bs (a
compiler/interpreter in the spirit of Basic, see bs(1)), and assembly
language (see as(1)).

Personally, some reasons I find bs noteworthy is (a) it is not much
like BASIC (from today's perspective) and (b)  as mentioned in the
wikipedia page, "The bs language is a hybrid interpreter and compiler
and [an early] divergence in Unix programming" (from Research Unix
mentioning only the other three languages):

q(
The bs language was meant for convenient development and debugging of
small, modular programs. It has a collection of syntax and features
from prior, popular languages but it is internally compiled, unlike a
Shell script. As such, in purpose, design, and function, bs is a
largely unknown, modest predecessor of hybrid interpreted/compiled
languages such as Perl and Python.
)

It survives today in some System III-derived or System V-derived
commercial operating systems, including HP-UX and AIX.

If you have additional information that might be useful for the
wikipedia page, please do share it.

Peace,
Dave

P.S. Here is a 2008 TUHS list discussion, "Re: /usr/bin/bs on HPUX?":

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 01:08:26PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
...
  Lord Doomicus scripsit:

  I was poking around an HP UX system at work
today, and noticed a
 command I've never noticed before ... /usr/bin/bs.

 I'm sure it's been there for a long time, even though I've been an
 HPUX admin for more than a decade, sometimes I'm just blind ... but
 anyway ....

 I tried to search on google ... it looks like only HPUX, AIX, and
 Maybe AU/X has it.  Seems to be some kind of pseudo BASIC like
 interpreter. 
 That's just what it is.  Here are the things I now know about it.

 0.  The string "bs" gets an awful lot of false Google hits, no matter
 how hard you try.

 1.  "bs" was written at AT&T, probably at the Labs, at some time between
 the release of 32V and System III.  It was part of both System III and
 at least some System V releases.

 2.  It was probably meant as a replacement for "bas", which was a more
 conventional GW-Basic-style interpreter written in PDP-11 assembly
 language.  (32V still had the PDP-11 source, which of course didn't work.)

 3.  At one time System III source code was available on the net,
 including bs.c and bs.1, but apparently it no longer is.  I downloaded
 it then but don't have it any more.

 4.  I was able to compile it under several Unixes, but it wouldn't run:
 I think there must have been some kind of dependency on memory layout,
 but never found out exactly what.

 5. I remember from the man page that it had regular expressions, and
 two commands "compile" and "execute" that switched modes to storing
 expressions and executing them on the spot, respectively.  That eliminated
 the need for line numbers.

 6. It was apparently never part of Solaris.

 7. It was never part of any BSD release, on which "bs" was the battleships
 game.

 8. I can't find the man page on line anywhere either.

 9. The man page said it had some Snobol features.  I think that meant
 the ability to return failure -- I vaguely remember an "freturn" command.

 10.  99 Bottles of Beer has a sample bs program at
 http://www2.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-bs-103.html .

 11. If someone sends me a man page, I'll consider reimplementing it as
 Open Source.

 --
 We are lost, lost.  No name, no business, no Precious, nothing.  Only empty.
 Only hungry: yes, we are hungry.  A few little fishes, nassty bony little
 fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death.  So wise they are; so just,
 so very just.  --Gollum        cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan 
-- 

dave(a)plonka.us  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/