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From: Rugxulo
Subject: P5, and associated test (the PAT)
Date: 16 Feb 2010, 00:35:34

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 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).

> 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).

> 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.   :-)

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