Re: [TUHS] Ratfor revived!

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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Henry -- most people that I am aware used the original Fortran-IV version
since that was the Lingua-Franca.  The Pascal version was a few years
later, and frankly other than to read the book, I personally never ran the
results from them.  But I can say I did use the original Fortran version
under VMS back in the day.  As bwk says in the Pascal edition, it was
actually a difficult thing to do because Pascal lacked many features that
really made it uniform across implementations, portable between systems
themselves, and as a reasonable systems programming language.  See: Why
Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language
<http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html>

Clem
ᐧ

On Thu, Dec 2, 2021 at 12:44 AM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you, Clem.  I am working on getting the tools running in DOSBox,
> which seemed most straightforward.
>
> The Byte article (the scan of which I am very grateful for; not having to
> go trawling through the stacks at the Oberlin College library is always a
> plus) claims that the tools have been implemented on:
>
> ACOS
> Amdahl
> Apollo
> AN/UYK
> Burroughs
> CDC
> Cray
> Data General
> DEC
> FACOM
> GEC
> HP
> HITAC
> Honeywell
> IBM
> Intel
> Interdata
> Modcomp
> Multics
> NCR
> Perkin-Elmer
> Prime
> Rolm
> SEL
> Tandem
> Univac
> Wang
> Xerox
> CP/M Machines
> MS/DOS Machines
> UNIX Machines
>
> Which is quite the list; I've never even heard of a few of those!  Based
> on the files in the UNIX Archive, am I to assume that most of those ports
> took advantage of a native Pascal compiler?  That's how I'm planning to
> bring the tools up on my local RT-11 machine.
>
> -Henry
>
> On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 at 19:34, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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