[HN Gopher] PostScript 1.0 - A Code Study
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PostScript 1.0 - A Code Study
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-10-04 23:46 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ztoz.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (ztoz.blog)
| kencausey wrote:
| I'm curious about the history of the base language reportedly
| designed at Evans & Sutherland 1971ish. I couldn't turn up much
| in the few minutes of searching I did. If anyone can provide
| links to papers or anything on this subject I would appreciate
| it.
| jwstarr wrote:
| As a a starting point, "The Origins of PostScript"
| (https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/2018-warnock.pdf)
| provides a few details on the language and Gaffney's
| involvement. Warnock's oral history for the Computer History
| Museum (https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102
| 73875...) also includes the story. Gaffney's patent provides
| the most detail but, unfortunately, it is written as a patent
| rather than a language description.
|
| The DoD DTIC service has a couple of reports that cover the
| Harbor Pilot Simulation, but I haven't found any reports
| written by E&S. The Computer History Museum has some records
| from Evans and Sutherland, but I don't think any of them cover
| the language.
| kencausey wrote:
| Thanks, but I saw that much, I should have been clearer. I'm
| hoping for something on the scale of a survey if not a paper.
|
| Honestly, my first curiosity regards whether Chuck Moore and
| Forth get any mention or whether this is a true parallel
| development, possibly necessitated by the hardware at hand.
| My perception, based on zero evidence, was that Forth had
| some influence on the design of Postscript.
| tln wrote:
| Apparently not. From "The Origins of PostScript" mentioned
| by GP:
|
| > The architecture suggested by John Gaffney was to be
| based on a fictitious stack machine (at that time we had no
| knowledge of a similar approach taken by the Forth
| language).
|
| That is the only mention of "Forth".
| fanf2 wrote:
| That led me to this presentation on the Eidophor projector
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-BvMcqEc98
| WCSTombs wrote:
| Slightly tangential, but here's my own Sierpinski triangle
| program from a couple of decades ago, which IMO is considerably
| simpler than what they show: %!
| /threshold 4 def /Sierpinski { dup
| threshold ge { 3 {dup 2 div Sierpinski dup 0 rmoveto
| 120 rotate} repeat } { 3 {dup 0 rlineto 120
| rotate} repeat closepath } ifelse pop }
| bind def 50 50 moveto 512 Sierpinski fill
| showpage
|
| It actually can be simplified a bit more, and the explicit
| recursion can be removed entirely, since there's already a free
| operand stack.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I've been writing a PostScript interpreter as a retirement
| project. I deliberately avoided looking at the Adobe source
| although I have been running the LaserWriter firmware[1] in
| MAME[2].
|
| At the moment I'm just implementing the language. The core
| interpreter is done apart from error handling and a ton of
| operators. After that I'll decide whether to go on to the
| imaging.
|
| [1] http://beefchicken.com/retro/laserwriter [2]
| https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/apple/l...
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