Re: [9fans] too good to pass up

Re: [9fans] too good to pass up

[erik quanstrom]

not even his allocator?

- erik

On Fri Apr 28 08:02:29 CDT 2006, brantley@coraid.com wrote:
> > Not that I'm defending writing C as
> > though it were Algol 68...
>
> I kind of liked it after the initial shock.
> Even inspired the Obfuscated C Contest.
> I don't think SRB's code was obfuscated, though.
>
>

Re: [9fans] too good to pass up (SRB Comments)

[Brantley Coile]

That was really John Mashy's fault, as I understand it.  He suggested
it to SRB.  I had to deal with it when I ported V7 to the 68K.  Too
bad every processor wasn't as clean in this reguard as the PDP-11.

For those who might not have heard of this, SRB caught segfault
signals, allocated more memory and just returned.  The instruction
that caused the segfault would restart.  It was an automatic memory
allocator.  Problem was that not all processors could pull off this
sort of stunt.

Geoff cleaned this up years ago.

> not even his allocator?
>
> - erik
>
> On Fri Apr 28 08:02:29 CDT 2006, brantley@coraid.com wrote:
>> > Not that I'm defending writing C as
>> > though it were Algol 68...
>>
>> I kind of liked it after the initial shock.
>> Even inspired the Obfuscated C Contest.
>> I don't think SRB's code was obfuscated, though.
>>
>>

OT: Re: [9fans] too good to pass up (SRB Comments)

[Dave Lukes]

The story from the horse's mouth was that the PWB shell already used the
sigsegv trick
because they were concerned about (groan) speed,
so before they'd use Bourne's shell they insisted that it use the same hack.

Of course, the PWB people didn't care:
after all it was "portable" in the Humpty-Dumpty sense: it worked on
Vaxes & PDP/11s.

I wonder how many different people had to rewrite that code for the M68K?:-)
(luckily someone had already done it before I got there:-)

    DaveL

Brantley Coile wrote:
> That was really John Mashy's fault, as I understand it.  He suggested
> it to SRB.  I had to deal with it when I ported V7 to the 68K.  Too
> bad every processor wasn't as clean in this reguard as the PDP-11.
>
> For those who might not have heard of this, SRB caught segfault
> signals, allocated more memory and just returned.  The instruction
> that caused the segfault would restart.  It was an automatic memory
> allocator.  Problem was that not all processors could pull off this
> sort of stunt.
>
> Geoff cleaned this up years ago.
>
>
>> not even his allocator?
>>
>> - erik
>>
>> On Fri Apr 28 08:02:29 CDT 2006, brantley@coraid.com wrote:
>>
>>>> Not that I'm defending writing C as
>>>> though it were Algol 68...
>>>>
>>> I kind of liked it after the initial shock.
>>> Even inspired the Obfuscated C Contest.
>>> I don't think SRB's code was obfuscated, though.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>

Re: OT: Re: [9fans] too good to pass up (SRB Comments)

[Brantley Coile]

> I wonder how many different people had to rewrite that code for the M68K?:-)
Lots.

Re: [9fans] too good to pass up

[Charles Forsyth]

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i think both those mechanisms were much less shocking in `Unix: the early years',
and i found them quite interesting, even though i had no intention of emulating them.
(mind you, i subscribed to the algol68 bulletin.)

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From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] too good to pass up
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 08:01:58 -0500
Message-ID: <d95f31573a6820f5d27d18130cc49c2e@quanstro.net>

not even his allocator?

- erik

On Fri Apr 28 08:02:29 CDT 2006, brantley@coraid.com wrote:
> > Not that I'm defending writing C as
> > though it were Algol 68...
>
> I kind of liked it after the initial shock.
> Even inspired the Obfuscated C Contest.
> I don't think SRB's code was obfuscated, though.
>
>

Re: [9fans] too good to pass up (SRB Comments)

[Taj Khattra]

>   That's some tricky programming! Do you know of any place one can get
> an access to the original code ?

you can browse it here:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/fault.c.html

Re: [9fans] too good to pass up (SRB Comments)

[Roman Shaposhnik]

On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 09:10 -0400, Brantley Coile wrote:
> That was really John Mashy's fault, as I understand it.  He suggested
> it to SRB.  I had to deal with it when I ported V7 to the 68K.  Too
> bad every processor wasn't as clean in this reguard as the PDP-11.
> 
> For those who might not have heard of this, SRB caught segfault
> signals, allocated more memory and just returned.  The instruction
> that caused the segfault would restart.  It was an automatic memory
> allocator.  Problem was that not all processors could pull off this
> sort of stunt.

  That's some tricky programming! Do you know of any place one can get
an access to the original code ?

Thanks,
Roman.