[TUHS] capturing history of bs(1) command / programming language

[Dave Plonka <dave@plonka.us>]

Hi TUHS folks,

Earlier this month I did a fair bit of research on a little known Unix
programming language - bs - and updated the wikipedia pages
accordingly.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bs_(programming_language)

Thanks for solving some bs mysteries goes to its author, Dick Haight,
as well as those that got us in touch: Doug McIlroy, Brian Kernighan,
and John Mashey.

Apart from what is in the aforementioned wikipedia page, in exchanging
email with me, Dick shared:

q(
I wrote bs at the time Unix (V 3?) and all of the commands were being
converted from assembler to C. So Thompson’s bas became my bs — sort
of. I included snobol’s succeed/fail feature (? Operator/fail return).
[...]

No one asked me to write bs. [...] I tried to get Dennis Ritche to add
something like “? / fail” to C but he didn’t. This is probably part of
why I wrote bs. I wasn’t part of the Unix inner circle (BTL Computing
Research, e.g., Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy, etc). Neither were Mashey
& Dolotta. We were “support”.
)

The Release 3.0 manual (1980) mentions bs prominently on page 9:

   Writing a program. To enter the text of a source program into a
UNIX file, use ed(1). The four principal languages available under
UNIX are C (see cc(1)), Fortran (see f77(1)), bs (a
compiler/interpreter in the spirit of Basic, see bs(1)), and assembly
language (see as(1)).

Personally, some reasons I find bs noteworthy is (a) it is not much
like BASIC (from today's perspective) and (b)  as mentioned in the
wikipedia page, "The bs language is a hybrid interpreter and compiler
and [an early] divergence in Unix programming" (from Research Unix
mentioning only the other three languages):

q(
The bs language was meant for convenient development and debugging of
small, modular programs. It has a collection of syntax and features
from prior, popular languages but it is internally compiled, unlike a
Shell script. As such, in purpose, design, and function, bs is a
largely unknown, modest predecessor of hybrid interpreted/compiled
languages such as Perl and Python.
)

It survives today in some System III-derived or System V-derived
commercial operating systems, including HP-UX and AIX.

If you have additional information that might be useful for the
wikipedia page, please do share it.

Peace,
Dave

P.S. Here is a 2008 TUHS list discussion, "Re: /usr/bin/bs on HPUX?":

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 01:08:26PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Lord Doomicus scripsit:
>
> > I was poking around an HP UX system at work today, and noticed a
> > command I've never noticed before ... /usr/bin/bs.
> >
> > I'm sure it's been there for a long time, even though I've been an
> > HPUX admin for more than a decade, sometimes I'm just blind ... but
> > anyway ....
> >
> > I tried to search on google ... it looks like only HPUX, AIX, and
> > Maybe AU/X has it.  Seems to be some kind of pseudo BASIC like
> > interpreter.
>
> That's just what it is.  Here are the things I now know about it.
>
> 0.  The string "bs" gets an awful lot of false Google hits, no matter
> how hard you try.
>
> 1.  "bs" was written at AT&T, probably at the Labs, at some time between
> the release of 32V and System III.  It was part of both System III and
> at least some System V releases.
>
> 2.  It was probably meant as a replacement for "bas", which was a more
> conventional GW-Basic-style interpreter written in PDP-11 assembly
> language.  (32V still had the PDP-11 source, which of course didn't work.)
>
> 3.  At one time System III source code was available on the net,
> including bs.c and bs.1, but apparently it no longer is.  I downloaded
> it then but don't have it any more.
>
> 4.  I was able to compile it under several Unixes, but it wouldn't run:
> I think there must have been some kind of dependency on memory layout,
> but never found out exactly what.
>
> 5. I remember from the man page that it had regular expressions, and
> two commands "compile" and "execute" that switched modes to storing
> expressions and executing them on the spot, respectively.  That eliminated
> the need for line numbers.
>
> 6. It was apparently never part of Solaris.
>
> 7. It was never part of any BSD release, on which "bs" was the battleships
> game.
>
> 8. I can't find the man page on line anywhere either.
>
> 9. The man page said it had some Snobol features.  I think that meant
> the ability to return failure -- I vaguely remember an "freturn" command.
>
> 10.  99 Bottles of Beer has a sample bs program at
> http://www2.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-bs-103.html .
>
> 11. If someone sends me a man page, I'll consider reimplementing it as
> Open Source.
>
> --
> We are lost, lost.  No name, no business, no Precious, nothing.  Only empty.
> Only hungry: yes, we are hungry.  A few little fishes, nassty bony little
> fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death.  So wise they are; so just,
> so very just.  --Gollum        cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan

-- 

dave@plonka.us  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/