[TUHS] Re: Software written in B

[Angelo Papenhoff <aap@papnet.eu>]

After writing this mail I actually started reversing the B binaries.
You can find them here: http://squoze.net/B/programs/

I did find some differences in versions of the B runtime and library.
Especially interesting was an implementation of the cksto routine
in su and stty that checks whether an address in an assignment is in a
reasonable range ("LV out of range" error if not)

What is perhaps interesting historically is that the su binary contains
a hardcoded password ^Q^R^S^T, which is not printable for a good reason:
it is given as a command line argument.

I will hopefully continue with this in the next time (if, goto, mail and
glob are left).

Best,
aap

On 14/06/23, Angelo Papenhoff wrote:
> Thank you two for finding this!
> I did some disassembling yesterday and have uploaded brt1.s and brt2.s
> to my site now: http://squoze.net/B/brt/ (I haven't actually assembled
> them yet, there may be mistakes)
> 
> Some observations:
> 
> - The 'chain' format is actually a linked list and not a list of
> addresses. Phil and I both got this wrong.
> 
> - The "Init" string is an error message if for some reason the B init
> chain didn't run or main doesn't look like a function
> 
> - The cmdline arguments overwrite part of the init code. There's about
> 80 bytes of space for them before it overwrites the code that builds the
> argv vector
> 
> - brt2.s is only to mark the beginning of the stack
> 
> 
> I also saw some differences in the bilib code but haven't really
> analyzed that part (yet?)
> 
> Would be really great if we could get all the files disassembled and
> decompiled and restore the source code for everything :)
> 
> Best,
> Angelo