3 ms·
cute little language; this must have been pretty slick for those with a shell to a unix box wanting to put together a graph in 1984, considering there was rathe
by 0x69420 3y ago
cute little language; this must have been pretty slick for those with a shell to a unix box wanting to put together a graph in 1984, considering there was rather little if any typesetting like that on PCs of the day
one fun thing of note is the bell labs penchant for lines of positional-feeling lowercase keyword spam in their DSLs (`ticks bot out from 10 to 70 by 10 ""`, `ticks right out at rep 1, 3, 10, 30, 100`); this is something that carries on through stuff like plumbfile syntax (http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/6/plumb http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/6/plumb), or even, many years down the line out the labs, iptables/pf rules
- KineticLensman 3y agoFun times. I used the underlying pic (and then nroff) rather than grap but I remember a time-consuming rabbit hole of trying to programmatically generate the pic source, e.g. for diagrams that had regularly repeating elements (like some sort of networks). This was 1985 or so. I was never worried by the keyword spam.
- ajstarks 3y agoSee: https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/decksh-object-reference https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/decksh-object-reference
- 0x69420 3y agook this is kind of cheating; anyone can achieve keyword spam with algol block syntax. grap has braces and still manages it
- 082349872349872 3y ago> ...considering there was rather little if any typesetting like that on PCs... I was amused by the question posed in the "Alternatives" section: > Besides GRAP and your local draftsperson, what other choices are there?