Subject: Re: "cputype?"

From: nr (Norman Ramsey)
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 89 20:11:36 EDT

> Subject: "cputype?"
> is not a command on my Unix machine (a Sun).
> 
> David

I have added instructions to README and to WebMakefile that deal with
cputype.  As far as I know, it is a local idiosyncracy, and my
documentation predates it.  Thank you for calling it to my attention.

It looks like you've already figured it out, but a shell script
containing the line `echo sun3' will do fine if it is somewhere on
your search path.

> An installation problem:  People who care about Trojan horses
> don't put "." at the beginning of their path, so shell scripts
> invoked as "make" never get executed.  Try "./make" instead.

I don't see a clean way to fix this.  Are any files affected besides
WEBROOT/Makefile?  The problem is that some of the calls to $(MAKE)
are calls to shell scripts in subdirectories, while others are calls
to /bin/make in the current directory.  What have you done to improve
things?

> I realize that "." at front is the Unix default, but it is an
> exceptionally stupid one (put a benign Trojan horse named "ls"
> in a few world-writeable directories on a time-shared Unix machine,
> and see what happens).  I don't know why this isn't more widely
> worried about.

I think this isn't worried about because most people assume the world
is benign until they are bitten once or twice.  Some of my colleagues
swear by never putting . on their path at all.  Me, I haven't been
bitten yet.
> Subject: That cute trick with '#' in variable definitions
> was unknown to me.  I broke things badly "cleaning up" the
> definition of the three directories.  I think you ought
> to either change the formatting, or mention that there is
> a reason for the '#' immediately following the definitions
> (it's not like I'm a novice at this, either)

I put a comment in.  When I first prepared this for distribution, I
broke things badly by commenting those (previously uncommented) macro
definitions. 

> It made it past "make boot", and I'm fixing to look at
> the documentation.  My intention is to see if this can
> easily be made to generate Modula-3 -- if so, (I think)
> I can use it to generate test input for the Modula-3
> compiler.  Of course, any such test input is unlikely to
> be incredibly sophisticated, since it will be machine-
> generated, but it's better than none at all.

Generating Modula-3 from a Modula-3 literate program should be no
trouble at all.  One the other hand, if you want to translate
something else into Modula-3, you are probably better off using
WEB-to-C as a basis.  Let me know how it goes; I would love to have a
Modula-3 spider file to add to the distribution.

Norman

---

From: [email-masked] (David Chase)
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 89 09:29:18 -0700

It seemed to compile after I changed Makefile in the top-level
directory to say "./make", but I just now tried a "make -n clean"
and found a few missing things.  I'd suggest that in the case where
you want "make" to mean "/bin/make" that you just drop in a shell
script along the lines of

  /bin/make $*

There's a fair chance that I'll be able to translate Pascal into
Modula-3 with a little assistance.  Another worthy project would
be to get a dialect of Pascal output more acceptable to the
brain-dead Pascal compilers used on Olivetti machines.

David