murthy@arvak (Chet Murthy) (04/25/88)
What the heck is this "bs" program? It isn't in BSD 4.3 or SUN unix. --chet-- In Real Life: Chet Murthy ARPA: murthy@svax.cs.cornell.edu SnailMail: Chet Murthy North Woods Apts #20-2A 700 Warren Road Ithaca, NY 14850 Office: 4162 Upson (607) 255-2219 MaBellNet: (607)-257-2542
wrv@ihlpm.ATT.COM (Vogel) (04/30/88)
Bs is a programming language that's been in UNIX since V7, including System III and Sys V from AT&T. I don't know why SUN doesn't support it, I can only guess that maybe since SUN UNIX is based on VAX BSD 4.2 UNIX, and since VAX BSD 4.2 UNIX was based on UNIX - V32 (a 32 bit port of V7 UNIX) (I think I have the linneage correct, I'm sure someone will correct me if I don't), perhaps the original V32 port didn't include it for some reason, although it made it into later versions of VAX UNIX like SYS III. There's certainly no technical reason why it would be unavailable on the SUN, or any machine. The interpreter is extremely machine independent. Does this help? Does anyone else write in bs? To answer your question, bs is an interpreted programming language kind of like awk(1), but completely different in implementation, functionality and syntax. Its kind of like a mixture of basic, fortran, snobol and C. I write stuff in it all the time, but then I write stuff in awk, m4 and lex all the time, so maybe my passion for these obscurities is unique. -Bill Vogel, AT&T Bell Labs, ...ihnp4!ihlpm!wrv (312) 416-4116