A Universal Scripting Framework (1996) [ps]

ccs.neu.edu

34 points·wtetzner··10 comments

It's a bit strange that this is a .ps file, which Chrome didn't natively turn into a PDF for me. So I converted it to a PDF and hosted it at https://sdegutis.com/ll.pdf for anyone's convenience.

It's from 1996--back when PDF was proprietary and non Windows support was inconsistent.

I'm only vaguely aware of the de-proprietary-ization of PDF; I remember at some point the market was flooded with print-to-PDF software, and commentary that this was happening because of something had somehow changed.

What happened?

Adobe made the file format open source to spur adoption. It worked.

Make no mistake, there were a good number of PDFs floating around before that point. It was pretty much immediately popular, but they were kind of a hassle for everybody not running Windows. There were programs to display them like xpdf, but they weren't bug compatible and lived in a legal grey area. Everything got a lot better once Adobe released the rights on the format.

(1996) [ps]

A case for "little languages" embedded in scheme rather than written in C.

or as pragmatic alternative "Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language" [0].

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/tcl-usenix.p...

Doesn't seem to work right now.

I'm curious if scsh still builds.

https://github.com/scheme/scsh

Scsh's process notation has been ported to CHICKEN as an egg: https://wiki.call-cc.org/egg/scsh-process

Also I think there's a mailing list devoted to little-languages..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com