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Grap – Kernighan and Bentley's language for typesetting graphs (1984) [pdf] (cat-v.org)
66 points by smartmic 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



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), or even, many years down the line out the labs, iptables/pf rules


> ...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?


Fun 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.



ok this is kind of cheating; anyone can achieve keyword spam with algol block syntax. grap has braces and still manages it


reminds me a bit of gnuplot.


Yes indeed, I was attracted to learn of GRAP because I have been such a huge fan of gnuplot for my needs, which is incidentally quite well described here:

https://edg.uchicago.edu/tutorials/pretty_plots_with_gnuplot...

Quite a lot more palatable to my eyes, but also GRAP is fun. How things have changed/stayed the same/etc.


(we changed the URL from http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/cstr114.ps to one that doesn't do a download)


It's too bad this didn't catch on. I would be entertained to message a colleague, "Hey, could you take a look at this pile of Grap?"




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