soft-eng@MITRE.MITRE.ORG (Alok Nigam) (04/25/89)
Software Engineering Digest Friday, 21 Apr 1989
Volume 6 : Issue 16
Today's Topics:
Ancient dispute
UK MOD STANDARD
UNIX DWB tools under MS-DOS
grep vs. SEARCH (Was Re: Software Development Tools) (U)
Re: Object Oriented design - Books? (U)
Re: grep vs. SEARCH (Was Re: Software Development Tools) (U) (3)
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Date: Tue, 18 Apr 89 11:21:30 bst
From: Tom Thomson <tom%prg.oxford.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Subject: Ancient dispute
Recent SW Eng digests have been running a revival of the Unix wars. Maybe the
warriors (in particular G.M. Harding) could benefit from reading Martin Healey's
paper in Computer Bulletin Dec 1986 ("The down side of Unix").
It's surprising to see byte-stream as a panacea on this newsgroup; engineering
is at least partly about using standard components rather than reinventing the
same things over and over again, and byte-stream files are such a low-level
component that one might reasonably expect rather higher order components to
be the norm. Of course it's frightening to see anything presented as a
universal panacea, still more frightening to see engineers accepting it - -
has Mr Leichter bought DEC's snake oil? has Mr Harding bought ATT's?
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Date: 18 Apr 89 1115
From: e38006@d1.Dartmouth.EDU (GOODLOE)
Subject: UK MOD STANDARD
There has been alot of talk in the formal methods community lately about
the new U K Ministry of Defense Standard 0050. It is supposed to dictate
that formal methods be used for saftey critical projects. Does any one know
when the standard will be complete and how I can get a copy of it when it
is. It would be intersting to compare the views on formal methods held by
those who wrote the UK MOD standard with those being advocated by
US DODs Software Engineering Institute (SEI).
Alwyn E. Goodloe
goodloe@d1.dartmouth.edu
PO Box 4206
Woodbridge Va. 22194
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Date: 18-APR-1989 11:58:44 GMT
From: <RESLERD%VAX1.NIHEL.IE@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: UNIX DWB tools under MS-DOS
In the near future I'd like to assign a compiler project to my
students where they are to reverse engineer a known, "simple" compiler.
I was hoping to have them tackle one of the UNIX's DWB tools ...
either eqn, pic, grap, or tbl. Unfortunately they will be forced to work
under MS-DOS; does anyone have or know of a *public-domain* version of any
[message was truncated here, but the rest seems obvious.]
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Date: 19 Apr 89 16:08:55 GMT
From: Ian Phillipps <mcvax!ukc!stc!idec!camcon!igp@uunet.uu.net>
Organization: Cambridge Consultants Ltd., Cambridge, UK
Subject: grep vs. SEARCH (Was Re: Software Development Tools) (U)
>... I didn't see anything in grep that
>SEARCH couldn't do. Did I miss something?
Well, there are these quite useful things called regular expressions.
How do you tell SEARCH to search for the equivalent of
egrep '^[a-z0-9_]([a-z_0-9]*[ ])*([a-z_0-9]+)[ ]*\([a-z_0-9 ,]*\)[ ]*E?[ ]*(\/\*.*)?$' "$@"
which locates (sanely laid out) C procedure definitions?
(The r.e.s in grep would be a little different, but I had the egrep version to
hand)
(Sorry if the mailer garbles this - the spaces in the square brackets really
mean "any whitespace" which vanilla [ef]+grep doesn't support directly.)
- ------------------------------
Date: 20 Apr 89 15:50:53 GMT
From: Kathy Iberle <hp-pcd!hpmcaa!kathyi@hplabs.hp.com>
Organization: HP McMinville Division
Subject: Re: Object Oriented design - Books? (U)
If you get the name of one (other than Brad Cox's book) could you
please post it? The last time I researched this subject, in fall
1987, no such book existed because the knowledge does not yet
exist.
The Adele Goldberg Smalltalk books and Brad Cox's book are both
good starters, but neither goes far enough for a large industrial
project.
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Date: 21 Apr 89 02:40:03 GMT
From: Richard S D'Ippolito <sei!rsd@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Subject: Re: grep vs. SEARCH (Was Re: Software Development Tools) (U)
>How do you tell SEARCH to search for the equivalent of
> [line deleted]
>which locates (sanely laid out) C procedure definitions?
This is getting a bit out of hand. Software engineering inplies a different
way of thinking about code and procedures. Without getting into the the
question of whether one even tries to engineer software in "C", why would
your software be so disorganized that you'd even need to do such a thing?
Why do you accept a development platform that requires such tools?
It's asking the masons to make the bricks from mud and straw at the job
site, like the old days.
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Date: 21 Apr 89 14:38:00 GMT
From: Jim Perry <ulowell!apollo!perry@bbn.com>
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Subject: Re: grep vs. SEARCH (Was Re: Software Development Tools) (U)
In article <2797@titan.camcon.co.uk> igp@camcon.co.uk (Ian Phillipps) writes:
>
>egrep '^[a-z0-9_]([a-z_0-9]*[ ])*([a-z_0-9]+)[ ]*\([a-z_0-9 ,]*\)[ ]*E?[ ]*(\/\*.*)?$' "$@"
>
This was great, but you left out the :-).
Seriously, why do these discussions always come down to trying to compare
two systems (grep/search, vms/unix...) as if there were a binary answer to
which is better? How about acknowledging that we've still got a long way
to go in this business and comparing good and bad features for the next
spin? (If you think the above incantation is the best, or even a good and
useful, way of finding C function definitions, nevermind).
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Date: 21 Apr 89 14:55:21 GMT
From: Edward C Horvath <att!pegasus!ech@bloom-beacon.mit.edu>
Organization: AT&T ISL Middletown NJ USA
Subject: Re: grep vs. SEARCH (Was Re: Software Development Tools) (U)
In article <2797@titan.camcon.co.uk> igp@camcon.co.uk (Ian Phillipps) writes:
>How do you tell SEARCH to search for ... C procedure definitions?
>From article <3210@ae.sei.cmu.edu>, by rsd@sei.cmu.edu (Richard S D'Ippolito):
> ...Without getting into the the
> question of whether one even tries to engineer software in "C", why would
> your software be so disorganized that you'd even need to do such a thing?
> Why do you accept a development platform that requires such tools?
Amazing. You managed to miss the point and demonstrate your callousness
at the same time. Grow up, and listen up:
In any given environment, one may have occasion to search for strings which
do NOT correspond to entities directly supported by that environment.
When that occasion arises, you may want the power of a regular-expression
matcher.
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End of Software Engineering Digest
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