Re: [TUHS] Ratfor revived!

[Deborah Scherrer <dscherrer@solar.stanford.edu>]

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All you folks revisiting the Software Tools should remember that there 
was an entire movement around the first book, based at Lawrence Berkeley 
Lab.  The Software Tools group, an offshoot of Usenix, had about 2000 
members.  We created an almost-entire Unix environment based on a 
virtual operating system that we designed, inspired of course by 
Kernighan's ideas.  The collection was ported to over 50 operating 
systems, including some without file systems.   This is all still freely 
available, and stored with the Unix archives.

Deborah

On 12/1/21 12:59 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Arnold -- sounds fun.  Thank you!!!  I'll add it to my growing pile of 
> things I want to play with at some point.   I too had a wonderful 
> childhood experience with the SW tools.  Somebody had a number of them 
> running on a VMS box when all we had was the VMS Fortran compiler, no 
> C yet.
>
> I am curious why did you decide to use byacc?   I would have thought 
> in a desire to modernize and make it more available on a modern system 
> -- was there something in byacc that could not be done easily in 
> bison?   To be honest, I had thought Robert Corbett did them both and 
> bison was the successor to byacc, but I'm not a compiler guy - so I'm 
> suspecting that there must be a difference/reason.   As I said, this 
> is purely curiosity -- an educational opportunity.
>
> Thanks again,
> Clem
> ᐧ
>
> On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 3:41 PM Arnold Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>     Hi All.
>
>     Mainly for fun (sic), I decided to revive the Ratfor (Rational
>     Fortran) preprocessor.  Please see:
>
>     https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/ratfor
>
>     I started with the V6 code, then added the V7, V8 and V10 versions
>     on top of it. Each one has its own branch so that you can look
>     at the original code, if you wish. The man page and the paper from
>     the V7 manual are also included.
>
>     Starting with the Tenth Edition version, I set about to modernize
>     the code and get it to compile and run on a modern-day system.
>     (ANSI style declarations and function headers, modern include files,
>     use of getopt, and most importantly, correct use of Yacc yyval and
>     yylval variables.)
>
>     You will need Berkely Yacc installed as byacc in order to build it.
>
>     I have only touch-tested it, but so far it seems OK.  'make' runs
>     in like 2
>     seconds, really quick. On my Ubuntu Linux systems, it compiles with
>     no warnings.
>
>     I hope to eventually add a test suite also, if I can steal some time.
>
>     Before anyone asks, no, I don't think anybody today has any real use
>     for it.  This was simply "for fun", and because Ratfor has a soft
>     spot in my heart.  "Software Tools" was, for me, the most influential
>     programming book that I ever read.  I don't think there's a better
>     book to convey the "zen" of Unix.
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     Arnold
>

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