From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Howard Trickey" To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <200104262032.QAA22251@augusta.math.psu.edu> Subject: [9fans] purpose of APE Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 09:07:16 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 942d727c-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 It is interesting to me that the "purpose of APE" has become to allow compiling legacy and external programs. When Andrew Hume and I made APE originally, the purpose was different. It was a time when some of the researchers in our center were actively maintaining Research Unix, while others were doing Plan 9, and many of us had reasons to work on both systems. APE was a viewed as a way of writing the programs we cared about so that they could be compiled with no change on all of the systems in our center. Now clearly, APE on Unix was easy to do and a first class way of writing programs, while on Plan 9, the mapping is sometimes a bit tortured (especially signals, select(), and some of the permission stuff), so APE on Plan 9 is a hack, but it did serve its purpose. I agree that the current use of APE is indeed to compile legacy and external programs. But if that were the original goal, it would have been different: there would have been a more kitchen-sink-union-all-the-Unixes feel to it (ugly, ugly) so that monstrosities like autoconf would work (and it would have infected Plan 9 --- especially the system directory conventions --- more than any of us would have liked). - Howard Trickey howard@research.bell-labs.com