cat -v harmful stuff

Full text of cat-v paper recovered

I’m pleased to report that the full text of the ‘Program Design in the UNIX Environment’ paper has been recovered:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v

Thanks are extended to pr, who located the postscript file on the old netlib site:

http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/

This saga began when I noticed that the version of the file long hosted at cat-v.org was missing some words – apparently the result of the italics macro being dropped when the file was translated from troff to postscript. I contacted Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike (the original authors of the paper), but neither of them had access to the original troff sources. I eventually located a print copy of AT&T BELL LABORATORIES TECHNIAL JOURNAL, October 1984, Vol. 63, No. 8, Part2, wherein the article had originally been published. Interestingly, this published version contained completely different translation errors; italics were intact, but all of the backquotes from the code examples had been dropped.

Needless to say, it’s a relief to have finally located a complete copy of the document.