I've updated the transcript, thanks again.
I should remind myself to consult you whenever there's a piece of history, you got that covered well and a lot of online docs are misleading.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Perl might be a bad example since it actually uses a bytecode compiler.

It is, but it's a minor detail, just for the sake of example.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: That was the second attempt of implementing pipes. Their first approach - which only lasted a couple of months - used "<" and ">" to define the direction.

Again, a minor detail to the overall idea of the podcast, though it would've emphasized how McIlroy was so adamant at getting them included.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Not anymore: There are blown-up Unix tools (tried Solaris recently?) today while the "KISS" thing had been ported to VMS and other operating systems soon after its invention.

Regardless, this wasn't a rant podcast about the direction they're taking nowadays.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: roff already existed in a Multics version.

Missed that thanks.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Not one single manpage on Unix was written in runoff as runoff never existed on Unix. There was not even a roff command on PDP-7 UNIX. Before he did troff, Joe Ossanna ("jfo") - double-N - implemented his own version of McIlroy's BCPL version of Robert Morris's implementation of RUNOFF named "roff" into V1 UNIX: man(1).

I think in that case I was using "runoff" as the generic word to include the family but you're right, they're not the same. Thanks for that piece of info, I could only find contradicting resources regarding that.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Depends on how you define a "language". Wouldn't that be B? dc is the oldest surviving interpreted language though.

Language = Turing complete maybe?? I'm not sure B is still largely used, it's probably on the brink of extinction.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: According to McIlroy's notes (p. 10), it was the first language to be run there. I could not find a source about whether it was the first program, but Ritchie suggested that it was, in fact, "one of the earliest programs to run on the PDP-11". As they had received their PDP-11/20 in 1970 and Unix ran on it in the same year, I would want to assume that dc predates 1971. Ken Thompson said that they already had a version of it on the PDP-7.

Should've said "one of the first". Thanks for the specific info.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Robert Morris was also the "roff" guy from above. The world was small back in the days.

Damn, should've mentioned that.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: There were quite some "eds" involved.

That was one page I would've certainly liked to have when doing the research. This tree is great.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Essentially having replaced Vim by ed on my servers, I wholeheartedly disagree.

So you're part of the "more or less", hahahahaha.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Gosling Emacs "didn't appear" before 1981, so, in fact, the expensive versions of Emacs were not a thing when vi was published. 1978 already had (versions of) TECO, Emacs's birthplace, as well as Stallman's original MIT Emacs itself which was available at no cost either - we had the topic "everything was free software once" in a previous discussion. Here is a list of free Emacsen.

I've noticed the date difference but I've still chose to left it in there because of the interview with Bill Joy and the comments it activated online. Soon after the interview the GNU Emacs got released. Though I wasn't sure if it was right, but it certainly was entertaining information.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Tanenbaum added the third-party Elvis editor to Minix - it was not created "by Minix" although its creator published it to the Minix newsgroup first.

Nice distinction. Though was it included in any other project before Minix or was Minix the reason why it got popular. I agree that "created" was probably not the right word.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: You cannot access ed features directly, except by calling ed as a subprocess. You can access ex features though, those are different.

Again, good eye for the distinction.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: ed does not limit you to the slash character: sxaxe or swawe, whatever works for you, replaces "a" by "e". sed does not support that.

I'm not sure I would've included that in the podcast. I didn't go into the picky details of each tools and incompatibilities between their inspirations.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Unlikely, since Unix was in its sixth edition by 1976. PWB/UNIX was not the same thing as "the Unix".

Yeah, I just noticed the time difference, that one got over me, thanks.

(03-03-2018, 02:12 PM)jkl Wrote: Covering syntactic difference between BSD make and GNU make could have been interesting though. Portability is a problem.

I'm not sure it had its place in this podcast.