Re: [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

["Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@math.utah.edu>]

John Floren asks

>> Anyone know of good description of SAIL computer systems?

SAIL was both an operating system at Stanford, and a programming
language at the same site, but the SAIL compiler ran on multiple
operating systems on the PDP-10.  

The first edition of William M. Newman and Robert F. Sproull's
``Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics'', McGraw-Hill, 1973,
ISBN 0-07-046337-9, had an appendix on the SAIL language, but that
book is in my campus office, and this week, I'm working at home, so I
cannot check how much they had to say about SAIL.  The bitsavers
archive should have programming language manuals for the SAIL
language.

When TeX and METAFONT were first written in 1977--1978, Don Knuth
programmed them both in SAIL, because it had the needed data
structures, recursion, and a good debugger.  However, by 1982, despite
the MAINSAIL effort to port the SAIL language to other platforms, it
became clear that a different implementation language was called for,
and the only candidate that offered portability to multiple CPU
architectures and operating systems at the time was Pascal.

That language has a number of syntactic aggravations, including
fixed-length character strings, so Don used his tangle preprocessor to
rewrite strings as lists of integers, and otherwise stuck to a strict
subset of Pascal.  By the late 1980s, the Pascal code was translated,
first manually, then automatically to C, and that is the language in
which it gets compiled today.  Any changes to the source code,
however, are done strictly in the original Pascal subset.  This year,
I have built TeX Live 2021 on AMD64, ARM32, ARM64, Alpha, M68K, MIPS,
PowerPC, RISC-V64, S390x, SPARC, and x86 CPUs, under numerous
operating systems, demonstrating that, thanks to C and Unix, TeX and
METAFONT remain widely portable.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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