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> Hidden inside WWB (writer's workbench), Lorinda Cherry's Parts annotated English text with parts of speech, based on only a smidgen of English vocabulary, ort

by mci 7y ago

> Hidden inside WWB (writer's workbench), Lorinda Cherry's Parts annotated English text with parts of speech, based on only a smidgen of English vocabulary, orthography, and grammar. Writer's Workbench was indeed a marvel of 1970's limited-space engineering. You can see it for yourself [1]: the generic part-of-speech rules are in end.l, the exceptions in edict.c and ydict.c, and the part-of-speech disambiguator in pscan.c. Such compact, rule-based NLP has fallen out of favor these days but (shameless plug alert!) Writer's Workbench inspired my 2018 IOCCC entry that highlights passive constructions in English texts [2]. [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-4_1_snap-Snapshot-Development/.ref-BSD-4/usr/src/cmd/diction https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-4_1... [2] https://ioccc.org/2018/ciura/hint.html https://ioccc.org/2018/ciura/hint.html

ivan_ah 7y ago
This Writer's Workbench seems really cool. The wikipedia page indicates there were quite a few more programs in the suite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer%27s_Workbench#Package_contents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer%27s_Workbench#Package_c... Do you know where I could be able to find the source for all of these? I'd be interested to "revive" these utils, possibly rewriting as python or bash for easy hacking. I have some basic scrips for that, and they are already proving to be useful even though they simply call grep https://github.com/ivanistheone/writing_scripts https://github.com/ivanistheone/writing_scripts
- dbremner 7y ago
  I don't think it has all of them, but [0] is a tarball from Research Unix that has some Writer's Workbench source code. The files are in cmd/wwb. Other tarballs may have more Writer's Workbench code but I haven't looked at them. [0] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cross_v10/v10src.tar.bz2 https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cros...
ahoka 7y ago
It's very interesting that the readme calls shell scripts "runcom", an archaic name coming from the Compatible Time Sharing System. This is also the origin for rc files.
- loeg 7y ago
  "Runcom" is still referenced by that name in BSD init(8): https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sbin/init/init.c?view=markup#l1041 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sbin/init/init.c?view=m...

by mci 7y ago

ivan_ah 7y ago

This Writer's Workbench seems really cool. The wikipedia page indicates there were quite a few more programs in the suite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer%27s_Workbench#Package_contents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer%27s_Workbench#Package_c... Do you know where I could be able to find the source for all of these? I'd be interested to "revive" these utils, possibly rewriting as python or bash for easy hacking. I have some basic scrips for that, and they are already proving to be useful even though they simply call grep https://github.com/ivanistheone/writing_scripts https://github.com/ivanistheone/writing_scripts

dbremner 7y ago
I don't think it has all of them, but [0] is a tarball from Research Unix that has some Writer's Workbench source code. The files are in cmd/wwb. Other tarballs may have more Writer's Workbench code but I haven't looked at them. [0] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cross_v10/v10src.tar.bz2 https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cros...

ahoka 7y ago

It's very interesting that the readme calls shell scripts "runcom", an archaic name coming from the Compatible Time Sharing System. This is also the origin for rc files.

loeg 7y ago
"Runcom" is still referenced by that name in BSD init(8): https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sbin/init/init.c?view=markup#l1041 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sbin/init/init.c?view=m...