From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: Steve Johnson <scj@yaccman.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Archaic yacc C grammar
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:58:00 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20181031005800.GA5670@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <c27ddaaf0161a10ff46759d5678ad5e317283fc9@webmail.yaccman.com>
I'm coming into this late (and tired, been working on my water system
and the carbs on my boat all day) but I *loved* the single namespace
for all structure fields.
Instead of
p->size
we have
p->st_size
and I instantly know that p is a struct stat pointer.
I get that it doesn't scale but man, oh man, do I love the early Unix
data structures that had one namespace. I kinda wish you hadn't fixed
that Steve.
What was the push that made you fix it?
On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 03:01:55PM -0700, Steve Johnson wrote:
> The closest I came was when we went from a single namespace for all
> structure names to a namespace for each structure, and references that
> were checked using the pointer type of the structure pointer.
> My code was a nightmare, and some of the old Unix code was at least a
> bad dream.???? I had to start out pretending to have a single
> namespace, but when I saw the use of an actual structure pointer I had
>
>
> to do it the new way.?? As I recall when I saw something that would
> not have been legal with the old rules (for example, two different
> structures with the same element name but different offsets) then I
> threw
> the switch and demanded the new way.??
>
> There were certainly system changes that were flash cut.?? For
> example, changing the file system format -- there was no attempt to
> allow both, which meant that the conversion program got one shot to
> get it right.?? And it didn't always manage that...
>
> Steve
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From:
> david@kdbarto.org
>
> To:
> "Steve Johnson" <scj@yaccman.com>
> Cc:
> "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> Sent:
> Mon, 29 Oct 2018 12:02:29 -0700
> Subject:
> Re: [TUHS] Archaic yacc C grammar
>
> On Oct 29, 2018, at 10:52 AM, Steve Johnson <scj@yaccman.com [1]>
> wrote:
>
> We actually had a pretty good system for making changes like that.??
> First, we would change
> the compiler to accept both the old and the new.???? Then we would
> produce a warning
> that on a particular date the old would no longer work.?? Then we made
> the old an error
> and printed a message about how to fix it.???? Eventually, we just let
> it be a syntax error.
> This process was applied many times on the way from typeless B to
> strongly typed C.
>
> Was there ever a time when a change was desired that you couldn???t
> accept both
> the old and the new?
>
> David
>
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] mailto:scj@yaccman.com
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-10-31 1:46 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-10-28 21:34 Lars Brinkhoff
2018-10-29 3:00 ` Steve Johnson
2018-10-29 7:31 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2018-10-29 17:52 ` Steve Johnson
2018-10-29 18:37 ` Warner Losh
2018-10-30 8:16 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2018-11-03 21:50 ` Steve Johnson
2018-10-29 19:02 ` David
2018-10-30 22:01 ` Steve Johnson
2018-10-31 0:58 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2018-10-31 13:49 ` Clem Cole
2018-11-03 22:14 ` Steve Johnson
2018-10-31 6:09 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2018-10-31 15:39 Noel Chiappa
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