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In 1971 I began to extend the B language by adding a character type and also rewrote its compiler to generate PDP-11 machine instructions instead of threaded code. Thus the transition from B to C was contemporaneous with the creation of a compiler capable of producing programs fast and small enough to compete with assembly language. I called the slightly-extended language NB, for `new B.'

Ken Thompson was indeed C's inventor, as this article by, um, Dennis Ritchie describes: The Development of the C: Language

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Common Lisp HyperSpec
• Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed
• Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation
• The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed
• Reflections on trusting trust
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big
• John McCarthy's homepage
• Dennis Ritchie's homepage
• Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to
• Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design)
• GTK-Gnome Application Development (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
• KDE 2.0 Development (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
• Eric Weissteins Mathworld
• Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
• Parsing techniques - A practical guide
• Art of assembly language programming (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
• Paul Carters 386 assembly book (same comment as above)
• An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (see comment above)
• How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing (not a classic, yet!)
• The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format
• Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions

Mathematiticians have invented a language called ML (Meta Language) which is a functional language in which you can write mathematical formulas almost as you would mathematically define them.
In the area of functional progamming you should also consider Common Lisp which is a well known functional language used mostly for AI.

On the properiatry side, many mathematical algorithms get coded in MatLab which provides built-in matrix manipulation and lots of additional libraries (you'll probably find out most of the stuff you want to write is already there...)

In any case, the progamming language should be tightly fitted to the application.

Much more eloquent things said Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger.
Also, SDSI by Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson touches on the same territory.

Much more eloquent things said Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger.
Also, SDSI by Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson touches on the same territory.

Much more eloquent things said Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger.
Also, SDSI by Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson touches on the same territory.

And if you think X is too hairy and scary to dive into or think network transparent windowing must be possible to do in a simpler way, also check out Plan 9's /dev/draw and rio stuff.

those crazy plan9 guys at Bell Labs have talen care of the problem for me

Venti

For a fact, the exact implementation may be diferrent from one might imagine looking at the source, but it's the property of lazy pure functional languages with their equational reasoning and other optimizations that are possible under that paradigm -- but the optimizations never affect the halting property of the program or computation results.

Which, unfortunately, cannot be said about the old school languages like C, C++, .NET, Java, Fortran, Scheme etc. etc.

Feel encouraged to read about some functional languages semantics. The SMLofNJ homepage, and Haskell definition might be a good start.

oh yeah :)

It's just locate under another name and a smaller cron interval.

The way to really do it would be hack up your own nfs clients that did the logging for you rather than polling.

but now I get what he's getting at I'm not sure I know what the big deal is.

Certainly nothing like a "Virtual Filesystem".

It's just an expensive way of running ls on a cron every night/hour and using awk, sed, grep & join on the plain text output

if you really are interested in virtual filesystems though then plan9 is a place to look. Each processes get's a file namespace. Using bind, attach & union one can build different views of the same namespace.

Each namespace is a combination of disks on file and programs presenting files and directories.

All file access is via a protcol 9p so you can write your own file servers to present data like files and directories.

they say it better than me

our experience with the implementation of a stack machine in the AT&T Crisp microprocessor [5] leads us to believe that stack architectures are inherently slower than register-based machines. Their design lengthens the critical path by replacing simple registers with a complex stack cache mechanism. In other words, it is a better idea to match the design of the VM to the processor than the other way around.

http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=310

Check the slides too at:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/rob/qcintro.pdf

Regards,
Marc

yes, that's exactly how it works

instead of a really long $path you just have

PATH=/bin

and then in termrc (for example)

bind /bin/$CPUTYPE /bin # cpu specific exes
bind /usr/$user/bin/bin /bin # my exes
bind /usr/$user/bin/rc /bin # my shell scripts
bind /usr/someapp/bin /bin # some app I want

the namespace is built on a per process group basis so I can pick and choose the exes ()or anything else) on a per process basis

To compile a program with the C library from July 16, 1992:

%mount /srv/boot /n/dump dump
%bind /n/dump/1992/0716/mips/lib/libc.a /mips/lib/libc.a
%mk

you can have a different set of libs per window
(or run the windowmanager INSIDE one of it's own windows and set one namespace for that whole group)

plan9 has no symlinks

because "everything is a file" this even works for remote servers & network stacks.

import helix /net
telnet tcp!ai.mit.edu

more

The correct logical follow on is likely to be fundamentally different (in an information theoretical sense). Perhaps it will be quantum computing , which has physical reasons for existing (although manufacture of quantum devices is in the most preliminary stages, sp it may be a long time before we see serviceable quantum machines).

This isn't a troll, I'm just trying to get a handle on why exactly the HURD exists.

1) Is it because its all GPL?

2) Is it because its a microkernel?

3) Maybe a new, improved microkernel? Not MACH.

4) Security?

5) Performance? Yea right.

6) Ease of use? Isn't that up to KDE and GNOME?

7) Translators, Namespace unification, RPC? Been there, done that.

So, exactly why does HURD exist? What does it bring to the table that hasn't been seen dozens of times before? (Besides allowing non-root users to mount partitions!)

Exactly. Let's take yesterday. Yesterday, we got a bazillion submissions about Bell Labs having invented a one-molecule transistor. Wait, we said, we already ran a story about that.

Here's the link that we ran a few weeks ago. And here's the press release from yesterday that caused another round of news stories, and another round of story submissions to slashdot. Go ahead, click through and check them out.

Now, every news source that covers these things went ahead and ran two stories about this - after all, there were two press releases! Nobody wrote in to them to complain about duplication, because it isn't easy and your complaint just disappears into the ether. Here it's easy and you can complain publicly.

Exactly. Let's take yesterday. Yesterday, we got a bazillion submissions about Bell Labs having invented a one-molecule transistor. Wait, we said, we already ran a story about that.

Here's the link that we ran a few weeks ago. And here's the press release from yesterday that caused another round of news stories, and another round of story submissions to slashdot. Go ahead, click through and check them out.

Now, every news source that covers these things went ahead and ran two stories about this - after all, there were two press releases! Nobody wrote in to them to complain about duplication, because it isn't easy and your complaint just disappears into the ether. Here it's easy and you can complain publicly.

Yesterday the announcement was made that Bell Labs scientists had created a single-molecule transistor, an invention that will impact how small electronics can get and that will come to affect us all in the next few years.

Does that get posted here? Noooooooo, but some stupid fucking shit about same game that was lame way back when it was still called DOOM in 1993 comes along, and whoa, stop the presses!

Slashdot: n3wz 4 g4am1ng l00z3rz, bu11$h1t th4t d0n't m4tt3r

What I really want is this: A desktop environment which behaves like a single machine. A desktop which uses local and remote resources seamlessly. A desktop which I can add processing-power/storage/etc to by simply turning up another box and adding it to my environment.

you want plan 9.

Well, if algorithm in this chip anyhow recembles Bell Labs text to speech system, then it handles this text pretty well. I'll check home how XP's narrator handles it thou...

You can find those manpages here:

Unix Programmer's Manual November 3, 1971.

i forgot to mention that Wily is available now for a unix or unix clone near you

here's it's homepage
http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/

plan9 is http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9

Fractional quantum hall effect

On the contrary--the "theoretical math" was never developed for a specific representation of information, much less binary. In fact, information theory accomodates any representation, all the way back to Shannon..

The real difficulty is physical implementation. Coming up with coding schemes is trivial.

But XML doesn't store relational data.

But it can. How many of you who have been around the IT industry for a while remember heirachical databases?

My database text book Database System Concepts, (I did this subject at uni in 1987) contained a chapter on heirachical databases. Fortunately the chapter is even available online: Heirachical Databases. If you want to know how to transform XML to a relational DB, read this.

Have a look through the chapter, you will find some AMAZINGLY familiar diagrams. Innovation hey :)

But XML doesn't store relational data.

But it can. How many of you who have been around the IT industry for a while remember heirachical databases?

My database text book Database System Concepts, (I did this subject at uni in 1987) contained a chapter on heirachical databases. Fortunately the chapter is even available online: Heirachical Databases. If you want to know how to transform XML to a relational DB, read this.

Have a look through the chapter, you will find some AMAZINGLY familiar diagrams. Innovation hey :)

You cannot be an architect unless you also implement, since it's impossible to design the architecture unless you know what happens inside the software. And you cannot get this knowledge without participating in the implementation. Therefore, there is no problem. The only thing is, there are higher hopes for you (in addition to the ordinary requirements for coders, you are also expected to actually design the system!) It's just more responsibility. Nothing else changes!. See the Architect also implements (http://www.bell-labs.com/user/cope/Patterns/Proce ss/section16.html) software process pattern for a detailed overview.

OK people I just wanted to let you know the truth. According to the official bell-labs web site, and the web-presentation I listened to yesterday they have only managed to create a single transistor. Are the people down in NYTimes looking for some cheap sensation?(AGAIN!!!)

I'm in love! .. at least her invention will help me run my 'how the hell do lush/pothead programmer/musicians meet hot molecular physicists' algorithm. (Yeah, it sucks, UD turned down my application to turn the problem into a UD Job ... )

The good news:
Bell Labs scientists Zhenan Bao and Hendrik Schon have fabricated molecular-scale organic transistors.

The bad news:
As you can see in the picture, they are REALLY BIG molecules!

Otherwise Amigas can do some pretty nifty stuff with Arexx, the amiga version of rexx. Basically letting you add functionality to apps, or provide bridges between them.

/Erik

These maps could get much better in the future, especially if some new router protocols are developed that can report how much traffic is travelling through their individual lines. You could then colour code the links by traffic passing through them at a particular time. Red = very active, blue = idle. The backbones would be immediately obvious. This would also create a better map. The problem with the current maps is that they are generated using traceroute. This has the effect of making a few sites look very well connected when, in fact, they are simply the searching computers. By getting the routers themselves to divulge information about each link, you would get a complete map of the whole public internet. This may be possible now, I don't know much about BGP and its friends. Anywho, something to think about.

These maps could get much better in the future, especially if some new router protocols are developed that can report how much traffic is travelling through their individual lines. You could then colour code the links by traffic passing through them at a particular time. Red = very active, blue = idle. The backbones would be immediately obvious. This would also create a better map. The problem with the current maps is that they are generated using traceroute. This has the effect of making a few sites look very well connected when, in fact, they are simply the searching computers. By getting the routers themselves to divulge information about each link, you would get a complete map of the whole public internet. This may be possible now, I don't know much about BGP and its friends. Anywho, something to think about.

Right know Foobar Computers and Foobar Foodstuff are fighting over the domain foobar.com. If you get rid of TLDs, they will fight for .foobar. What's the difference?

Using trademarks for domain names won't work either. Foobar Computers and Foobar Foodstuff may well both have a trademark on the word Foobar, but for different products.

For a fun real-world illustration, see this page. It lists many products called "Unix", such as Unix® diapers and Unix eyeglass frames.

The only solution I see, is (a) getting rid of .com, .net, etc. and only keep the regional domains and maybe .int, and (b) force organisations to use their full name. Of course, you won't have short URLs with this scheme...

Yeah it seems you're right.

I think what's more worrying though is the fact that there's not much being done on advanced user-interfaces. Microsoft has put a lot of money into AI applications such as speech-recognition, writing, etc. Linux is just starting to become user-friendly on the desktop!

I think it's unlikely that Microsoft will do better with Millenium than an open source operating system that already exists: Plan9 from Bell Labs. Plan9 already supports location independence, aggressive abstraction, introspection, and all the other stuff that is in Microsoft's vision (Inferno, which the paper cites, is somewhat based on Plan9). The limitations Plan9 has (and it has many) are, I think, intrinsic to this vision, and I doubt traditional operating system designers are equipped to deal with it--otherwise, they would have already done so over the last few decades. And nothing in Microsoft's paper suggests that Microsoft is straying outside this well-grazed field.

Altogether, it looks like Microsoft is going to do what they always do: they are 10-20 years behind the curve, and they are working on another unimaginative, outdated operating system.

OS research has been pursueing these goals for years. There's nothing there that's really very interesting or new. It sounds like they've just browsed the web for a little while and summarized what the various projects are striving for.

One project that's come pretty far is Mosix (I think they're planning to integrate bits into Linux 2.5, but I'm not sure). Then of course there's Plan 9 and Inferno from the fine folks who brought you Unix. And lets not forget Tanenbaum's Amoeba.

a lot of the ideas in the mircosoft paper reminded me of plan9, the research OS that was developed at Bell Labs by th likes of Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Sean Dorward, Bob Flandrena, Ken Thompson, Howard Trickey, and Phil Winterbottom. I would imagine that anyone interested in concrete examples of some of the ideas (specifically aggressive abstraction and location-irrelevance) should take a look at plan 9 (and its sister OS, inferno). In addition to analogs to the features mentioned in the Microsoft article, plan 9 has other very nice features to boot. The most interesting to me is treating EVERYTHING like a file handle. Resources from other machines, processes, com ports: everything is all available as a part of one tree structure. You can treat the I/O of a com port like the input and output of a file. A device driver can be written in a shell script (in plain text). Check it out: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/.

a lot of the ideas in the mircosoft paper reminded me of plan9, the research OS that was developed at Bell Labs by th likes of Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Sean Dorward, Bob Flandrena, Ken Thompson, Howard Trickey, and Phil Winterbottom. I would imagine that anyone interested in concrete examples of some of the ideas (specifically aggressive abstraction and location-irrelevance) should take a look at plan 9 (and its sister OS, inferno). In addition to analogs to the features mentioned in the Microsoft article, plan 9 has other very nice features to boot. The most interesting to me is treating EVERYTHING like a file handle. Resources from other machines, processes, com ports: everything is all available as a part of one tree structure. You can treat the I/O of a com port like the input and output of a file. A device driver can be written in a shell script (in plain text). Check it out: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/.

If you've really only been programming in Lisp for a week or so then you really haven't had time enough to appreciate what its strengths and weaknesses are. It sounds to me as though you have acquired a disease that is all too common amongst programmers - the desire to want to specialise in one language too early on.

I simply cannot emphasise enough how valuable it is to learn as many programming languages as possible. Even if you don't really like it at first, a language can grow on you in ways you would have never imagined. No language is perfect, so knowing a selection of different languages will give you the opportunity to choose a tool that is appropriate to the job in hand. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem you come across starts to look like a nail.

By keeping your horizons broad, most especially by learning languages that might seem strange, counter-intuitive or even downright annoying at first, I can assure you othat you will become a much, much better programmer in the long run. The ways in which languages differ can often give you an insight into the ways that different programmers might solve the same problem.

FWIW, the presence of closures and eval are not the only things that make Lisp distinctive from other languages. The one truly unique (not to mention incredibly powerful) feature of Lisp is macros. You will not be able to find these in Perl. Also, in Perl the standard way to solve problems is with an iterative, procedural style, where Lisp more often employs recursion and an applicative programming style, both of which are techniques well worth the effort to learn about.

Whether Lisp is better than Perl for AI is debatable. I'd argue in favour of Lisp for the following reasons: one is the fact that Lisp is extremely good at knowledge representation (and the subsequent manipulation of that knowledge), but more important is Lisp's ability to generate code with macros, effectively meaning that you can write programs to write other programs. It's also probably worth noting that Lisp is quite a lot faster than Perl, given a decent enough compiler. See The Programming Language Shootout if you don't believe me. Lisp is also a very mature language, with an ANSI standard, so unlike Perl you can be certain that it won't be pulling any carpets out from underneath your feet any time soon.

If I haven't done a enough good job of convincing you that learning Lisp is worthwhile (and I probably haven't) then try checking out Paul Graham's Beating the Averages. Also, be sure to check out Richard Gabriel's Good News, Bad News and How to Win Big. And have a read of Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig for some more specific examples of Lisp as an AI programming language. Particularly relevant might be the section in the preface entitled Why Lisp?.

And when you're done with Lisp, I'd recommend a look at Ocaml, SML, Ruby and Smalltalk (particularly the delightful Squeak)!

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ches/map/index.html

Presumably the development tools for Java have improved in the past two years. There are certainly a greater range of tools available than there are for Lisp. Also, I wouldn't rate code size as that important. If you want something extremely tiny you should look at colorForth, one of the densest languages I've ever seen, and also one of the most opaque. You could always code hexadecimal opcodes directly if you wanted. Finally, I think that both of these languages have a major flaw which has been corrected in others: a runtime type system which both eats up memory and wastes cycles. I suggest looking at Standard ML as an alternative language which is both functional like Lisp but statically typed like machine language. Much more than Lisp or Java, this language has the potential to be very efficient.

> a strong object-oriented type system which
> ensures that the vast majority of coding errors
> result in a type error (although it can take a
> little while to get used to Haskell's type system);

Yes, Haskell has a strong type system that finds many errors at compile-time. This is IMHO one of THE arguments why YOU(yes you) should use Haskell. It will make your programs better. But the type-system is not object-oriented. It uses type-classes to provide a way for overloading in the type-system. See this paper, for example.

BTW. Did you know that, because of this type system, Haskell programs cannot segfault.?

There are some that would agree. Interesting reading: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant

Very good, very controversial paper. There's probably been a story on it here, I'm just too lazy to look.

I've worked off and on in UWB research since 1991- in fact I used to work with Doug Cummings, one of the people mentioned in the Article (at the University of Texas Applied Research Laboratories). I've been hearing UWB hype for ten years now- but really, there is no magic to it, and it has some very real limitations.

UWB as a communication method depends on the time position of signals, which can be severely affected by the motion of the transmitter or reciever, especially if it is accelerating or decellerating. Traditional modulation techniques can and will be affected by UWB, though in many cases, it may just raise the noise floor.

The biggest problem with UWB right now is that it is a political football. The established users of the spectrum want to protect their "territory" from all threats, real and imagined. From what I've seen the reasoning is very much "It's different, so it must be BAD." In truth, UWB is another form of modulation. Just like FM has advantages (and disadvantages) in comparison to AM, so will we view UWB in the years to come.

Some day it will be used- it won't revolutionize communications, but it may give us a little more efficient use of spectrum- Like Turbo codes and the like, they give us an incremental increase in what we can do. Claude Shannon's "Limit" still holds and puts bounds on what we can do.

The reasons for NOW, as mentioned by Ian, seem very much in line with what Plan9 tries to do. Wouldn't effort be better spent in developing:

a. Further documentation, especially for newbies. This would not only further Plan9's exposure, but also introduce more people to the really interesting and quite remarkable concepts on which it is based. Even further, any sort of demos or tutorials would be fantastic, since a lot of us get stuck into particular habits of computing and have trouble exploring new ways of doing things (which Plan9 seems to do all over the place). Plan9 is not targeted for a wider audience, but I feel confident that it would be possible, as well as beneficial, to achieve widespread exposure, if not acceptance, of it.

b. More apps and drivers. I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen it shouldn't be too difficult to write for the OS, since the existing source code is well documented (there's even a detailed, step-by-step walk-through of the kernel code!), and for those who might be able to write video drivers (which are especially needed), the features that need to be implemented or made available are very few. Plan9 seems really usable for those lab guys, and I bet with some more drivers and a few apps, it would be quite usable and accessible to the rest of us.

The reasons for NOW, as mentioned by Ian, seem very much in line with what Plan9 tries to do. Wouldn't effort be better spent in developing:

a. Further documentation, especially for newbies. This would not only further Plan9's exposure, but also introduce more people to the really interesting and quite remarkable concepts on which it is based. Even further, any sort of demos or tutorials would be fantastic, since a lot of us get stuck into particular habits of computing and have trouble exploring new ways of doing things (which Plan9 seems to do all over the place). Plan9 is not targeted for a wider audience, but I feel confident that it would be possible, as well as beneficial, to achieve widespread exposure, if not acceptance, of it.

b. More apps and drivers. I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen it shouldn't be too difficult to write for the OS, since the existing source code is well documented (there's even a detailed, step-by-step walk-through of the kernel code!), and for those who might be able to write video drivers (which are especially needed), the features that need to be implemented or made available are very few. Plan9 seems really usable for those lab guys, and I bet with some more drivers and a few apps, it would be quite usable and accessible to the rest of us.

The reasons for NOW, as mentioned by Ian, seem very much in line with what Plan9 tries to do. Wouldn't effort be better spent in developing:

a. Further documentation, especially for newbies. This would not only further Plan9's exposure, but also introduce more people to the really interesting and quite remarkable concepts on which it is based. Even further, any sort of demos or tutorials would be fantastic, since a lot of us get stuck into particular habits of computing and have trouble exploring new ways of doing things (which Plan9 seems to do all over the place). Plan9 is not targeted for a wider audience, but I feel confident that it would be possible, as well as beneficial, to achieve widespread exposure, if not acceptance, of it.

b. More apps and drivers. I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen it shouldn't be too difficult to write for the OS, since the existing source code is well documented (there's even a detailed, step-by-step walk-through of the kernel code!), and for those who might be able to write video drivers (which are especially needed), the features that need to be implemented or made available are very few. Plan9 seems really usable for those lab guys, and I bet with some more drivers and a few apps, it would be quite usable and accessible to the rest of us.

the progeny of unix is

it has a sensible approach to directories I think you'll find refreshing