Posts by Vincent Manis

Re: Other legends of heritage

I believe Tenex was written in PDP-10 assembly language, though BCPL was definitely known (I worked at BBN in 1978, and BCPL had been used there for writing applications for several years). B was essentially a BCPL variant slimmed down to fit in tiny memory and filtered through Ken Thompson's syntax preferences, with some influences from Fortran and PL/I. It was used, I believe, to write several early UNIX commands, but, as the implementation was interpretive, and the language was word-oriented (every value occupied exactly one word), B was unsuitable for the byte-oriented PDP-11, and was never used in the kernel. C added variable-sized values, and was implemented as a compiler to native code, so was therefore a very good fit to the PDP-11, and the kernel.

Re: /usr

My understanding is that Unix “dd” was named, and given its obscure syntax, as a joke, an allusion to the IBM OS/360 JCL command DD (define dataset), whose famously obscure syntax with arguments such as VOL=AFF=ABC123 and DISP=(,KEEP) has bedevilled generations of MVT, MVS, and z/OS programmers. Accordingly, I doubt that the name “dd” stands for anything.

Re: an init tool that works and does its job flawlessly

I found the responses above hilarious. There is a better init system than systemd, it's OpenRC, no it's sysvinit, no it's the original Bell Labs init. Not one of the responses was about requirements., and clearly there isn't agreement on which of those is best. I might mention that back in the days when I used a PDP-8, it didn't have an init system at all. Or an operating system at all, come to think of it.

To respond to a couple of other points. I don't indulge in personal attacks on people, and have no opinion one way or the other about Lennart Poettering. I am sure he's a perfectly fine person, though, and I take at face value his desire to write useful system software. I might also mention that there are many others credited with work on systemd, so if there is a conspiracy, it's a big one. Maybe it involves tunnels under a Washington DC pizzeria? The github project contributors page goes on and on with different people who have had PRs accepted. Somewhere I saw a figure that there have been something like 2000 or more different contributors.

As for a claim that I was dumping on systemd, I wasn't. I do use it, and rarely get frustrated with it. Yes, it isn't done the way I would have done it, but there are loads of Unix things I wouldn't have done the way their authors did them: man pages written in nroff markup, for example. My criterion for excellence in software is not `is it what I would have done?' but `is it useful?'. And I find systemd eminently useful.

Re: In(n)it

OS/360 MVT ran on machines with 256K memory. Down with fancy operating systems!

No, it really was difficult to write a compiler that complied completely with the Report, because there were strangenesses and no permissible restrictions. I need only mention the difference between the roman and italic dot (yes there really was a difference), or the fact that the compiler my friends worked on had to have an entire pass devoted to deterining how parentheses were used. Make reasonable restrictions, and ALGOL-68 became not much more difficult to implement than any other modern language.

People writing compilers in those days didn't have the Dragon Book, because it didn't exist yet. However, they all knew about the latest and greatest parsing techniques, which eventually went into the first edition of Aho and Ullman. I remember learning about LR(k) and LALR(1) parsing from the papers that introduced these techniques.

Re: Control Data Corporation ALGOL-60

I never used IBM OS/360 ALGOL-60, but I was recently looking at its language manual on Bitsavers, and it too required apostrophes around key words. I did use an ALGOL-60 system on the IBM 7044 in the late 1960s; it too required apostrophes, but also the keywords were in French, as the compiler was written at the Université de Grenoble. One said 'DEBUT' X := X+1; Y := Y/2 'FIN'.

I should point out that lower case in those days was not an option. The character sets used prior to the mid 1960s, such as BCD and Fieldata, were generally 6-bit, and simply didn't have room for iit. And even the world moved to 8-bit bytes (7-bits on PDP-10), the printers couldn't handle them: a 63-character print train on an IBM 1403 printer could print substantially faster than a 95-character train. I remember well into the 1970s having to specify special job status, and worse turnaround, for jobs requiring lower case.

Although I was never actually involved in the ALGOL-68 effort, my grad supervisor was one of the Editors of the Report, and so I know a fair bit about it. It was not “hell” to write a compiler for it, as long as you made a few minor restrictions, none of which really harmed any real program. The compiler my friends were working on was never finished, because it refused to make any of these restrictions, so for example, it had to compile “(...50-pages-of-code...)” correctly. Not only that, but that compiler was written in Wirth's horrible worse-than-assembly-language PL360!

There were two major blunders in ALGOL-68: first, the ghastly two-level syntax used for description was impenetrable to anyone trying to learn the language, resulting in syntax rules with names like “SOID NEST2 out CHOICE STYLE clause” (I picked that one at random from the Report, and, yes, capitalization was significant), and second, there was no concrete syntax, meaning that programs were almost automatically not portable between implementations. The former was remedied by Lindsey and van der Meulen's “Informal Introduction to ALGOL-68”, the latter was never remedied.

One additional blunder was only apparent several years later. ALGOL-60 had no I/O, which everybody realized was a disaster (implementations from Univac, CDC, Burroughs, and IBM added their own custom I/O). So the designers of ALGOL-68 created an elegant “transput” library (they did like to speak in neologisms), which was firmly anchored in punched cards and line printers: a file was a 3D array of characters. This at a time when operating systems, starting with Unix, began treating files as a 1D array of bytes. A very uneasy fit!

Even with all these mistakes, ALGOL-68 was a significant contribution to programming languages, and doesn't deserve the condemnation and contempt sometimes heaped upon it. Still, even though I somewhat disagree with the authors of the Minority Report (Dijkstra, Wirth, Hoare, et al) about ALGOL-68, I do agree with Tony Hoare that ALGOL-60 was “not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors”.

Re: I have already prepared my black tape that says "Ctrl"

I remap Caps Lock as Compose.

Re: Sometimes...

I was friendly with the on-site IBM staff, both customer engineers and systems engineers. But that strategy wouldn't have worked with the “Student Area”, as that was the Place Where Keypunches Went To Die, and rarely was heard a servicing word there. I never had a card saw, but often a blank card cut in half would do the job. And when it didn't, I moved on to another machine.

Re: Sometimes...

When I took my first computer science course, in 1967, our computing equipment was a fleet of IBM 026 keypunches (the kind with vacuum tubes). Card decks were taken to some mysterious place, and the next morning, a printout would appear stating that the IBM 7044 computer had objected to a missing comma. The keypunches were balky at best, and often jammed. Since there was no mechanism to report a jammed punch, fewer and fewer working machines were available over time, meaning that we'd have to stand in the rain waiting to get into the WW2-era hut containing the keypunches. After a while, I discovered that it was relatively easy to unjam one of these machines, and I started to do so, so as to shorten my wait (and thus my deck was ready to go off to the computer, which would then object--the next day--to a missing right parenthesis). I have no idea how much I shortened the lifetimes of those keypunches, but my waits in the rain were certainly less.

Note: every word of the previous paragraph is literally true. Any resemblance to the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch is purely coincidental.

Re: I've not really used Windows much for 15+ years

I run Linux. Most times, with a new machine, it will boot into Windows, offering no options. So nowadays, with a new computer, I let it start Windows, then I use the `shrink windows partition' option to set it to a minimal size, then turn off Fast Start. On the next boot, I can start the Linux boot medium, and do a regular install. And Windows is still there, in the event that I need it. I never do.

Re: Promise you won't smell no...

I have bought a number of Lenovo machines over the years, in fact I have a Yoga 9i on order right now. I always do the same to each, installing GNU/Linux (typically Debian or Ubuntu, but on the new machine I'm planning on Manjaro). While I do leave a shrunken Windows partition behind, I don't leave any actual data on it, and never boot it. (I run Windows 11 on VirtualBox when I have to run it). I consider the risk to me by such a system identical to or less than the risk of anybody else's made-in-China machine.

Lenovo is certainly an odd company, in that they have a fair bit of former IBM staff and management. I couldn't say what percentage of the company is owned in or outside China, but until such time as we can find equipment of comparable quality and price made entirely in a Western country, from Western made components, Lenovo is no worse than its competitors.

Re: Clean keyboards

I can't demand that a phone survive a wash cycle; if I could, my original post would have been pointless. That said, all reputable device manufacturers provide a statement about environmental factors. I randomly picked Samsung, and found https://www.samsung.com/ca/support/mobile-devices/galaxy-phone-dust-and-water-resistance-rating. There they show the Ingress Protection ratings of (some of?) the Galaxy range of phones.

Re: Clean keyboards

I am profoundly not fond of my iPhone and its horrible OS. But I'll give it credit: it survived an entire wash/rinse/spin cycle. The washing machine in question locks when started, so all I could do was to stare and weep when I inadvertently loaded it along with the laundry. When it came out, it functioned flawlessly, and was unmarred except for a tiny scratch at one edge. I very much doubt I'll buy another iPhone,but The experience has taught me to demand that my next phone will be similarly sturdy.