FreeBSD as a development platform

astyle said:
If a compiler is impossible to find, I'd think that's a strike against it being good for OS development... unlike GCC or LLVM. T.T
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PL/S is a variant or dialect of PL/I which is intended for systems development. Good compilers for it have existed only inside IBM, which has used it since the 60s extensively for OS development. A compiler was reverse-engineered by Sperry/Rand (think Univac) at some point, but I don't think it was really distributed legally.
 
hruodr said:
A computer is a programmable machine, not an application box.
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Now that, I disagree with... I use mine as an application box. Yeah, some meta-programming is nice to have... But still, consider the scenarios of setting up the software so that it works to your liking, like a firewall or a DE. Complex setups (which a lot of us here have) are practically programming. You can use /bin/ls by itself or in a shell script - is that application box or programming? ;)
 
I've used C and JavaScript using just a terminal emulator and a text editor. Mostly I've tried parallel programming using UNIX IPC. When developing JavaScript I've found out that the earlier Firefox requests differ compared to the commercial ones, for example MacOS Safari (from IPad). It may be best to try web-pages from a commercial web browsers as well - multiple if needed. Most producible programming has been using an editor in multiple terminal emulator tabs and keyboard shortcuts.
 
astyle said:
Now that, I disagree with... I use mine as an application box. Yeah, some meta-programming is nice to have... But still, consider the scenarios of setting up the software so that it works to your liking, like a firewall or a DE. Complex setups (which a lot of us here have) are practically programming. You can use /bin/ls by itself or in a shell script - is that application box or programming? ;)
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/bin/ls in a shell script is programming. To me the visual C makes programming graphics easier, but not my thing.
 
ralphbsz said:
PL/S is a variant or dialect of PL/I which is intended for systems development. Good compilers for it have existed only inside IBM, which has used it since the 60s extensively for OS development. A compiler was reverse-engineered by Sperry/Rand (think Univac) at some point, but I don't think it was really distributed legally.
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I am going to guess that since only IBM has feasible access to the PL/S compilers, only IBM used it for OS development?

In that case, it seems to mirror astyle's observation.

It is an interesting approach though. IBM could offer the source code for much of the OS to customers to read. However the catch is that the compiler was witheld so the customers couldn't enhance the OS themselves and had to rely on IBM via service contract. It is almost the exact opposite of how proprietary products are run today. It isn't a bad approach. Though I can see why an illicit reverse engineered compiler appeared ;)
 
Actually, IBM customers of the mainframe era were able to read and modify the source code of the OS, and run modified versions. Local patches were common. But the only people who had access to PL/S compilers were IBM in-house developers, and IBM customers on their licensed OS installations.

I think the reverse-engineered compiler was used on other machines (Univacs in particular) that couldn't get IBM licenses, at least until much later (unbundling and all that).

And as a side remark: A lot of modifying of OSes back then did not require actually recompiling. Instead, OSes were delivered with a large number of "user exits": common operations exit to a no-op, which the user can modify with a "program" they provide, which can be as easy as a small bit of script, or as complex as a large amount of 360 assembly.
 
hruodr said:
That is one of the reasons I like tcl, but now it grew and has a lot of commands.

The other reason is the syntax. It reminds me Lisp, but with less parenthesis. I also like the way the name
and value of the variables are denoted. But this is a matter of taste, many people do not like tcl due
to the syntax. It is sensible to new lines, but that is by far not as ugly as the indentation sensitivity of
python. I would prefer perl over python.

I know only this scripting language, but have the impression, that syntax is the biggest / only difference
among them. Perhaps ruby is the exception?

But I am not a developer, I am just a computer user, and to that belongs making some programs one
needs. A computer is a programmable machine, not an application box.

I also learned a lot of languages, but now I use mainly tcl/tk, sqlite3, C, some posix tools like lex, of course TeX.
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Is impresive. I just can not see why the use of TeX. TeX is for mathematics.
 
Rock said:
I just can not see why the use of TeX. TeX is for mathematics.
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Well, for typing mathematics.

It is scriptable, but I avoid it, and try to substitute it I with "dynamic TeX" where it is appropriate,
namely generate TeX with tcl as one could generate html. For that I use this:


But I think, you can also use luatex and script with lua, never tried.
 
TeX for resumes!

TCL is actually very well respected with Lisp programmers (surprising nobody). If it had a bigger ecosystem it would be the scripting language of choice for many.
 
hruodr said:
Well, for typing mathematics.

It is scriptable, but I avoid it, and try to substitute it I with "dynamic TeX" where it is appropriate,
namely generate TeX with tcl as one could generate html. For that I use this:


But I think, you can also use luatex and script with lua, never tried.
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Your link look scriptable at best. I use to try TeX. No math. TeX is for thesis for MS degrees.
 
Rock said:
Your link look scriptable at best. I use to try TeX. No math. TeX is for thesis for MS degrees.
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If you use LaTeX instead of TeX, my "dynamic TeX" will be perhaps not necessary.

Scripting in TeX takes time, the combination with Tcl was meant to postpone or avoid TeX scripting,
for then concentrating on the Math.
 
Rock said:
Your link look scriptable at best. I use to try TeX. No math. TeX is for thesis for MS degrees.
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It is extremely useful for conferences because you can avoid changing most of your work and just swap out the template style provided by the conference and look consistent (and abide by their guidelines). This process is a little fiddly with MS Office / OpenOffice. So MSc, PhD and academic careers are often built on TeX.

Quite a few also use it for presentations (via Beamer). It is also very common for technical documentation (i.e the C++ standard draft). Mostly because it can be scripted and automated.

At work we use both approaches. Most of the HR / Graphics roles use MS Office but our technical docs are almost 100% typeset (not specifically with TeX however probs about 75%). For new hires, we specifically look for TeX on their CVs as a "nice to have" but it is a slight red flag if they have never used any typesetting program however.
 
hruodr said:
For that purpose it is perhaps better html with MathJax:

https://www.mathjax.org/
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For a presentation? I'm not convinced. You want to be able to generate a PDF to display on the projector and to later pass around via email.

Generating a pdf from a scraped web browser output is often random, depending on the browser used.

Not to mention, Beamer also has the bonus that you can use standard styles to look consistent. Here is one for i.e FreeBSD related presentations for example.

You can generally tell if it is a Beamer presentation due to the telltale links at the bottom right. I.e: https://papers.freebsd.org/2023/Eur...3-margiolis-arbitrary-instruction-tracing.pdf
 
ralphbsz said:
cracauer@ said:
cracauer@ said:
TeX for resumes!

TCL is actually very well respected with Lisp programmers (surprising nobody). If it had a bigger ecosystem it would be the scripting language of choice for many.
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TeX for resumes!
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I think the reverse-engineered compiler was used on other machines (Univacs in particular) that couldn't get IBM licenses, at least until much later (unbundling and all that).

And
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Using TeX to write resumes is overkill.
 
Rock said:
Using TeX to write resumes is overkill.
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No, it isn't.
Once you have defined your style-files and templates
TeX/LaTeX ain't nothing much more than writing text with your editor.
An experienced user may produce .dvi/.ps/.pdf files even quicker than with any wordprocessor.
 
Profighost said:
No, it isn't.
Once you have defined your style-files and templates
TeX/LaTeX ain't nothing much more than writing text with your editor.
An experienced user may produce .dvi/.ps/.pdf files even quicker than with any wordprocessor.
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if found the overkill isn't the writing but to tend the toolchain.
 
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