Rugxulo wrote:
Hi,
On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:55 AM, Scott Moore samiam@moorecad.com wrote:
THE BSI TESTS
I bought a dialing phone card and have been bothering the BSI directly by phone to encourage them to release the BSI tests, and the "model implementation" compiler.
Does the "model implementation" book itself mention copyright at all? It's hard to imagine that they would expect everyone to type it in manually AND not share it with anyone (even other book owners).
Jim Welsh, 1986, _A Model Implementation of Standard Pascal_ (Hardcover)
Amazon.com lists four (used!) copies from three sellers (FL, MD, OR): $84, $84, $172, $172
Yuk.
The book is copyrighted, which would also apply to its being OCR converted and posted online I would assume. This (for example) does not apply to the BSI validation suite, which was openly published without copyright notice.
The text says "All rights to the model implementation as a software product belong to UMIST". I have been banging on the UMIST (now merged and simply called Manchester University) external affairs department. So far they have not bothered to answer.
I would not sweat the book price. I think I paid about $40 for my copy. I have seen quite a few books bid up to insane prices. The vendors know nothing about the book, they just gathered that it is in short supply and price accordingly. When they can't sell a single copy at that price, you will see one show up at a reasonable price, but you have to check often to see it.
The BSI tests and the model compiler were programmed at various universities in combination with the ISO 7185 standard. It was all done off the payroll of the BSI, and the authors meant it to be freely available. Instead, the BSI tried to use it as a cash cow, charging $1000 per copy, and vastly more to "certify" implementations as compliant with the tests.
Don't the authors (or universities) have copyright on it? Where's Eben Moglen when you need him? :-))
Anyways, a lot of time has passed, the BSI has both discontinued the Pascal standard, and long stopped distributing the programs. However, they never released the copyrights they (apparently) hold over the material. I have heard several folks opine that the programs may no longer exist at the BSI, perhaps thrown away.
Ugh.
In my calls to the BSI, they have just given me the runaround ("we are waiting for an answer from the committee".. for several months now). If some of you care about the BSI hiding and killing a historically important program, now would be a good time to call them:
(0)2089967004 in London, ask for Beth Carter or Lucy Ahmed
I doubt my calling would help. (Besides, I'm not even sure how to call such a foreign number, I'm soooo naive, heh.)
More voices might get them moving. Again, the BSI never programmed any of the tests, and it is highly debatable that the original authors would have agreed to the BSI's current actions.
(reading Wikipedia)
Seems Jim Welsh and Quinn ported the CDC one to ICL 1900 in 1972 at Queen's University Belfast. (Welsh is Irish? Heh.) Also seems that other universities and people (including Welsh) got involved in various ports and rewrites, e.g. Manchester, Glasgow, etc. All of these apparently heavily influenced the "model implementation" of Welsh.
Anyways, long story short, surely somebody at Queen's University Belfast knows how to find Jim Welsh (assuming he has some right to his work).
He's retired, and he does not answer his email. I think realistically it's possible he may consider Pascal a closed issue and not care. It may make more sense to talk to the university about good press.
The GPC group would be the biggest beneficiaries of a BSI release of the tests to public domain. This would give you all a rock solid and well researched series of tests to run.
Since GPC is a GNU project, perhaps the FSF can lend a few legal hands to help smooth such a transition. At the very least, maybe they could get some dialog going.
Anyways, several folks realized that the original minimum memory, minimum bootstrap represented by P4 was not really necessary going into the 80's, and that it would be better to have a full, Wirth original and ISO 7185 Pascal compiler.
The CDC had two MB of RAM, right? (mid-60s?) Much more than most people had until much much later. Of course, these days it's quaint, but back then it was a big deal, hence why MS-DOS (and the 8088) in the early 80s only addressed max. 1 MB initially (until DOS extenders appeared for 286s, 386s, etc. in mid-to-late 80s).
You are right, and the CDC ran a full compiler for the CDC itself. The Pascal-P authors were proud that the system ran in minimal configuration with a subset of the language, the "minimum subset required to self compile". I think in retrospect it was a massive miscalculation for two important reasons. First, P2 was adopted by microcomputer users as a subset language without feeling the need to "complete" the bootstrap to a full language, and second, because presenting Pascal-P as a subset of the full language left important examples of implementation out of the porting kit. Of course I am talking about UCSD, but they were widely copied. Ken Bowles later did add back most of original Pascal to the compiler, but by then it was far too late. UCSD was a widespread dielect of Pascal, and Borland only cared about compatability with the first users of UCSD, not the later ones.
Now, as to why the GPC group might care about P5. P5 is both an example compiler, and also a large and non-trivial program written in ISO 7185 standard Pascal. It also enables "stack up" verification. That is, a series of ISO 7185 tests can be run against the base compiler, then P5 is run, and then P5 itself is run against the ISO 7185 test suite.
So P5 0.5 can now bootstrap itself. Definitely interesting. :-)
Actually, its probably the first time it was ever run on itself as an interpreter. They self-compiled P0-P4 (yes, there was a P0), but the goal was a listing of intermediates. To self-interpret and then self compile (that is, pcom running on the interpreter compiling itself) takes in the 10's of minutes. I suspect that this feat, running on a modern 2.4 GHZ x86 was probally beyond the CDC 6000 series in less than days of runtime. There was not much reason they would have tried. It would have been a pointless stunt (back then).