Software TOOLS by B.W.Kernighan and P.J.Plauger, published by Addison Wesley.

There are few books that make a significant contribution to one’s thinking. I doubt if anyone who has read this book has been utterly unaffected by it. The authors state that the purpose of the book is to teach how to write good programs that make good tools. They do this by presenting a set of programs which are designed to stand on each others shoulders to build into a full set of tools. The point is made that frequently one has to lash up a little program to do a specific thing – as it might be to count words – and when the purpose of the program has been met, the program is discarded. It is the contention of the authors that such a program is a tool, and should not be discarded. Moreover, they suggest that the quick lash up, while it gets the job done, suffers from a lack of thought and documentation. This lack of thought and documentation means that, if the program is resurrected at some stage, it is almost incomprehensible, and that the resurrector, even though he may be the author in the first instance, may well find it easier to rewrite the entire program from scratch.

Kernighan and Plauger set out in this book to illustrate a collection of general purpose tools – a series of programs which can readily be called on to do certain jobs. They discuss in a readable and clear way, the criteria involved in the design, the problems of implementation, and above all the flexibility of a good tool. If after reading this book, all one got from it was the discipline of clear thinking, that alone would be worth the price. But it is possible to actually implement the programs in this book on a machine, and their utility might be worth many times the book cost.

The programs are written for the most part in a language called RATFOR (RATional FORtran). This is so similar to structured English that it need cause no great concern. Some of the examples are also given in PL/1, which is similar to Pascal. It is a trivial matter to translate the clear structure of these programs to any machine language, or (better still) to higher level languages. I remember that the point has been made (but I can’t find the reference) that the programs are not necessarily the most efficient in the world, but that one’s own time is more important than the computer’s.

How true this is of the Nascom owner. Do you care if your poor hardworked Nascom has to stay up all night? No, you don’t, as long as the job is done when you want it!

In this book, a number of simple programs such as count a character, count a word etc., are introduced early on. Building on these, the book then proceeds to discuss file structures, sorting, text patterns, text editing, formatting of output, up to the level of formatting for composing machines (the book is photset, using some of their own tools, and one couldn’t tell it from a “real” book!), a microprocessor, and concludes with a RATFOR – Fortran Preprocessor. It would even be possible to convert that to a RATFOR-BASIC translator. It makes the minimum assumptions about the underlying operating system, dealing in a few primitives such as “Get a char”, “Put a char”.

I would suggest that this book is not for the absolute beginner, but anyone with a little experience fiddling around on a microcomputer should find it exciting and profitable to read.