Re: [TUHS] man-page style

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Norman Wilson]

I wrote (re my approach to sendmail.cf):

> Bill's half right.  I didn't invent a language; I used what was there.

Grant Taylor asked:

  Can I ask what language you did use?  Was it m4 or something else?

====

I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old
sendmail.cf.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 12/1/18 4:09 PM, Norman Wilson wrote:
> I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old 
> sendmail.cf.

Sorry, I mistook the context to be that you wrote something to write the 
cf file / language for you.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Dec 01, 2018 at 07:37:20PM -0700, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> On 12/1/18 4:09 PM, Norman Wilson wrote:
> >I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old
> >sendmail.cf.
> 
> Sorry, I mistook the context to be that you wrote something to write the cf
> file / language for you.

I'm kinda with Grant on this one.  Maybe I misunderstood but what I thought
you did was treat the sendmail.cf as assembler for a weird processor and
then you wrote a higher level language that compiled down to sendmail.cf.
Which, if that's that you did, is pretty studly.  I think Grant was asking
what you did the higher level language in, he was wondering if it was m4
(which I doubt, if I were doing that it would either be some nasty perl
script that I thought was going to be small but wasn't, or I'd just go
to lex/yacc/C).

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 12/1/18 7:44 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I'm kinda with Grant on this one.  Maybe I misunderstood but what I 
> thought you did was treat the sendmail.cf as assembler for a weird 
> processor and then you wrote a higher level language that compiled 
> down to sendmail.cf.  Which, if that's that you did, is pretty studly. 
> I think Grant was asking what you did the higher level language in, 
> he was wondering if it was m4

Yep, that's what I was my interpretation and my question.

> (which I doubt, if I were doing that it would either be some nasty perl 
> script that I thought was going to be small but wasn't, or I'd just go 
> to lex/yacc/C).

One of these days I should find out the genesis of the m4 (.mc) file 
syntax that is used to generate the .cf file.

I'm curious why m4 was chosen over other languages.  I wonder what the 
other language options were.

I know that I learned m4 because of Sendmail's .mc file.  I've since 
started using m4 for a number of other things.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:

> I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old 
> sendmail.cf.

And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Warner Losh]

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On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 3:31 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
> > I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old
> > sendmail.cf.
>
> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.
>

Blind, write-only programming at its finest. Trial and error until you
think there's no more error. Think.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Warner Losh wrote:

>       And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
>       programmer.
> 
> Blind, write-only programming at its finest. Trial and error until you 
> think there's no more error. Think.

I can only say one thing: APL\360...  Now, *there* was a write-only 
language.

Oh, the stories that I could tell.

-- Dave

[TUHS] APL - was Re: man-page style

[Toby Thain]

On 2018-12-04 2:48 AM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
>>       And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
>>       programmer.
>>
>> Blind, write-only programming at its finest. Trial and error until you
>> think there's no more error. Think.
> 
> I can only say one thing: APL\360...  Now, *there* was a write-only
> language.

For a more positive take on APL -- only for the open-minded -- try watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCJ3BCIudI

> 
> Oh, the stories that I could tell.
> 
> -- Dave
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

Re: [TUHS] APL - was Re: man-page style

[Nemo]

On 04/12/2018, Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
> On 2018-12-04 2:48 AM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> I can only say one thing: APL\360...  Now, *there* was a write-only
>> language.
>
> For a more positive take on APL -- only for the open-minded -- try
> watching:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCJ3BCIudI
>
>>
>> Oh, the stories that I could tell.

When I attended an UML course -- about a hundred years ago or so --
one of the attendees was from Reuters.  He told us that they were
moving to C++ because they could not hire enough people to learn APL,
their preferred development language at the tim, even though willing
to teach them APL.  He thought it far better suited to their task than
C++.

N.

>>
>> -- Dave
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

Re: [TUHS] APL - was Re: man-page style

[Paul Winalski]

Regarding APL\360, I interned at IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center for
a few years before joining DEC in 1980.  My first job there was to
write a link editor in S/360 assembler that would run stand-alone on
S/360 hardware (why I was doing this is an interesting story, but long
and way off-topic).  This was to replace an existing link editor that
was written in APL\360.  It was the largest APL program I've ever
seen--it ran for over 10 pages of solid code!  It also ran slower than
death.

-Paul W.

Re: [TUHS] APL - was Re: man-page style

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 12/4/18 10:55 AM, Paul Winalski wrote:
> why I was doing this is an interesting story, but long and way off-topic

I'm always interested in odd stories like this.

Perhaps it would be more on topic on the COFF mailing list.  ;-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 03 Dec 2018 09:30:06 +1100 Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
Dave Horsfall writes:
> On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
> > I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old 
> > sendmail.cf.
>
> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.

:-)

In 1985 for a client I had to check if Sendmail's
implementation of SMTP met FIPS standard or some such (don't
ask -- I don't recall most of the details now). I got pretty
familiar with it.  But ever since then I have not wanted to
use it. I switched to PostFix a long time ago but that too has
become rather complicated.

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2018 at 05:14:07PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Dec 2018 09:30:06 +1100 Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> Dave Horsfall writes:
> > On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
> >
> > > I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old 
> > > sendmail.cf.
> >
> > And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.

As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood,
swtch(), you are not a systems guy.  

But I don't think we should judge each other, we should admire those
amongst us who have taken the time to understand something deeply.
Doesn't really matter if it is the kernel (though that's where I like it)
or sendmail.cf (I gotta give credit to those that get that), it is all
about deep understanding.

If you did that much work and got it, welcome to the club.  It's kind
of a shitty club because nobody gets what you do so nobody values it, 
but some of us do.  

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:

>>> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a 
>>> programmer.
>
> As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, 
> swtch(), you are not a systems guy.

Ahh, line 2238...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 08:26:29AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> >>>And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
> >>>programmer.
> >
> >As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, swtch(),
> >you are not a systems guy.
> 
> Ahh, line 2238...

I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?

I learned swtch() because I wrote a userland thread library for Udi Manber
as a grad student (yield based as I recall).  I'd never really thought
about it hard, yeah, did all the CS toy OS stuff but I don't think they
made us write that.  I loved writing it, I did a super minimal one that
had the bulk of the work in C, just did the save/restore in asm.

It's just so satisying to go in as one process and come out as the
other (and annoying when some idiot used floating point - who does
that?  Cough, Clem, cough.  and you realize you didn't save/restore
fp registers :)

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Bakul Shah]

On Dec 4, 2018, at 1:34 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 08:26:29AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> 
>>>>> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
>>>>> programmer.
>>> 
>>> As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, swtch(),
>>> you are not a systems guy.
>> 
>> Ahh, line 2238...
> 
> I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?
> 
> I learned swtch() because I wrote a userland thread library for Udi Manber
> as a grad student (yield based as I recall).  I'd never really thought
> about it hard, yeah, did all the CS toy OS stuff but I don't think they
> made us write that.  I loved writing it, I did a super minimal one that
> had the bulk of the work in C, just did the save/restore in asm.

I too built a coroutine library. We used it for simulating
some real h/w we were building. The nice thing about h/w
simulation is no recursion so your threads can work with as
little as 50-100 bytes of stack, so even on a 64MB machine 100K
threads was not a problem! There is no yield() here being a
simulation core. Thread switch occurs in wait(), signal() &
busy(n) -- the last one to simulate passage of time. I built
the very initial version in 1982-83 using setjmp/longjmp! We
used it to check if our 5.6Mhz bus could support ethernet
traffic while doing other things.

Of course, this is much simpler than a unix swtch().

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Pierre DAVID]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2018 at 01:34:52PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
>On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 08:26:29AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>
>> >>>And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
>> >>>programmer.
>> >
>> >As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, swtch(),
>> >you are not a systems guy.
>>
>> Ahh, line 2238...
>
>I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?
>

"You are not expected..."

Pierre

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:

>>> As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood, swtch(),
>>> you are not a systems guy.
>>
>> Ahh, line 2238...
>
> I dunno what line it is, I'm guessing that's the # for the Lions book?

Yep.

-- Dave

[TUHS] swtch() (was: man-page style)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Wednesday,  5 December 2018 at  8:26:29 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
>>>> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
>>>> programmer.
>>
>> As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood,
>> swtch(), you are not a systems guy.
>
> Ahh, line 2238...

Not line 325 of ken/slp.c?

Greg
--
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Re: [TUHS] swtch() (was: man-page style)

[Clem Cole]

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Same thing...   it's line 2238 in Lions' numbering system on sheet 22 of
the sources book.   It's line 325 of ken/slp.c if you are in ed/vi or the
like.
ᐧ

On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 5:55 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday,  5 December 2018 at  8:26:29 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >
> >>>> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a
> >>>> programmer.
> >>
> >> As a systems guy I think if you have not written, or understood,
> >> swtch(), you are not a systems guy.
> >
> > Ahh, line 2238...
>
> Not line 325 of ken/slp.c?
>
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
>

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Re: [TUHS] swtch() (was: man-page style)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2018, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

>> Ahh, line 2238...
>
> Not line 325 of ken/slp.c?

The Lions book.  "You are not expected to understand this".

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] swtch() (was: man-page style)

[Paul Winalski]

On 12/28/18, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> The Lions book.  "You are not expected to understand this".

There was a similar comment in the sources for the VAX/VMS debugger's
primary interrupt dispatcher (which was written in assembler):
"WARNING:  If you think you understand this code, you're wrong."

-Paul W.

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

[arnold]

Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
> > I think you missed my point.  The language I used was plain old 
> > sendmail.cf.
>
> And anyone who has not edited sendmail.cf (shudder!) is not a programmer.
>
> -- Dave

Now you're just starting a pissing contest.