Re: [TUHS] Looking back to 1981 - what pascal was popular on what unix?

[Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3018 bytes --]

On 1/28/22 5:31 PM, Will Senn wrote:
> On 1/28/22 5:18 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:09 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>     I'm reading in, Kernighan & Plauger's 1981 edition of Software
>>     Tools in Pascal and in the book, the author's mention Bill Joy's
>>     Pascal and Andy Tanenbaum's as being rock solid. So, a few
>>     related questions:
>>
>>     1. What edition of UNIX were they likely to be using?
>>
>>
>> I'm afraid I can't speak to your 2nd and 3rd questions, but I can 
>> offer what I think is a reasonable guess about the first.
>>
>> One of the neat things about Unix and Unix-adjacent books of that era 
>> is that very often the copyright page held some information about the 
>> production of the book itself. I just so happened to have a copy of, 
>> "Software Tools in Pascal" sitting on my desk, and it says, "This 
>> books as set in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using a 
>> Mergenthaler Linotron 202 phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 
>> running the Unix operating system."
>>
>> Given the PDP-11 and the date (1981) one may reasonably conclude that 
>> it was running 7th Edition. I imagine the pascal was Joy's, from 
>> Berkeley.
>>
>>         - Dan C.
>>
> Great hint. 20 seconds after I hit send on the original email, I came 
> across this:
> http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
>
> Where Brian Kernighan talks about the challenges they faced porting 
> the ratfor examples into pascal. He explains that:
>
>     The programs were first written in that dialect of Pascal
>     supported by the Pascal interpreter pi provided by the University
>     of California at Berkeley. The language is close to the nominal
>     standard of Jensen and Wirth,(6
>     <http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html#lit-6>) with good
>     diagnostics and careful run-time checking. Since then, the
>     programs have also been run, unchanged except for new libraries of
>     primitives, on four other systems: an interpreter from the Free
>     University of Amsterdam (hereinafter referred to as VU, for Vrije
>     Universiteit), a VAX version of the Berkeley system (a true
>     compiler), a compiler purveyed by Whitesmiths, Ltd., and UCSD
>     Pascal on a Z80. All but the last of these Pascal systems are
>     written in C.
>
> So, you were right about it being Joy's pi.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Will

On the good news front, I was able to find a working pi/px environment - 
4.2bsd built from tape on simulated vax780 works great (thank god vi 
works there, too) and will run the programs in the book without mods, 
out of the box. 4.3 would probably work similarly (I put it on the 
list). I tried compiling the pascal distributed via 2bsd on v7, but 
wasn't able to get it built (story of my life). This is prolly expected 
because the notes in the distro say "This is still set up for version 
6", so I'll stick with 4.2 for the time being. Just glad to have a 
working environment to supplement the reading.

Will

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 5609 bytes --]