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* Re: [TUHS] v7 software
@ 2021-12-31  3:05 Douglas McIlroy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-12-31  3:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> Joy’s original 2BSD tape will give you UCB Pascal.

While I agree with Kernighan that Pascal is not my favorite
programming language, UCB Pascal is my favorite compiler because of
its spectacularly good syntax diagnostics. The diagnostics are
automatically generated, so they have a completely consistent style
and never go down rabbit holes trying to explain an error.

The UCB trick is to report the exact spot where LR parsing chokes and
suggest a canonical alternate token that allows progress. This simple
strategy is startlingly effective; the compiler taught me Pascal in an
evening.

It occurred to me that Pascal would be a suitable language in which to
express a certain algorithm.  Having skimmed the Pascal report a year
or more earlier, I knew it was a pretty typical language, so I grabbed
a sample program from somewhere and plowed ahead. I made mistake after
mistake, but every diagnostic was instantly suggestive. By the end of
the session I had a polished working program. In due time it was
accepted for publication.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] v7 software
@ 2021-12-30 22:10 Will Senn
  2021-12-31  1:21 ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 3+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2021-12-30 22:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

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I'm tooling around doing my annual dive into operating systems ancient 
and not-so-ancient and I've gotten back around to v7 because it has a 
working f77 in baseline. The 3b2 has f77 as an installable package but 
it crashes and burns with read statements like: read *,var - in both 
sysvr2 and sysvr3. After consulting with the fortran expert, I'm gonna 
chalk it up to "man there's a lot of backstory to these seemingly simple 
issues" and just work with v7... in full disclosure f77 also seems to 
work fine on 211bsd, but that's too new for today's dive :).

Anyhow, I ran through my install notes from back in 2017 and did a few 
updates on them to update urls (would everyone just go ahead and move to 
https already?), fix some clunky examples, fix some typos, and update to 
a more recent host environment (although some would argue that Mojave is 
out of date - just give me a drop in replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro X 
(a 32 bit app) that doesn't phone home every 5 minutes and I'll move to 
Monterey). Version 1.7 of the doc is posted on the blog: 
https://decuser.blogspot.com/

Anyway, now I'm ready to add stuff to my shiny new v7 instance and 
document the additions. So, on to the question of the hour... I did some 
looking around and couldn't easily locate any v7 software archives for 
additional software that will run on v7 (not the distros, which are 
adequately hosted in the Unix Archive). Stuff like pascal, fortran iv, 
fortran 90, basic, lisp and the ilk. Do y'all know of any good caches?

Later,

Will

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2021-12-31  3:05 [TUHS] v7 software Douglas McIlroy
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2021-12-30 22:10 Will Senn
2021-12-31  1:21 ` Clem Cole

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