Re: [TUHS] Ratfor revived!

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Software_Tools/
ᐧ

On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 5:25 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 at 17:17, Deborah Scherrer <
> dscherrer@solar.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
> Could you provide a link to said environment, and suggest what sort of
> machines it might have run on?  I probably have something here that will do
> it, and I am very interested.
>
> -Henry
>
>
>> 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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