On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 at 17:17, Deborah Scherrer 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 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 >> >