The Apple Calculator Language | Hacker News Reader

The Apple Calculator Language

wadetregaskis.com

41 pointsingve8 comments

Or, what Jef Raskin would have thought of MacBasic:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

Agree w/ the page author's fondness for RealBasic --- still have a copy of _BASIC for Windows 3.0_ which had a copy of it on a floppy disk (and a nifty graphical poker game as an example). Xojo is alive and well, though I haven't been able to justify a license, (diverted to HyperCard and Runtime Revolution which became LiveCode until their opensource rug pull) --- probably going to get PureBasic/SpiderBasic for my next project.

Are Raskin's criticisms of Pascal addressed in Oberon?

Awesome that this page has a running copy, and I'm looking forward to reading the original document.

Turning it around --- what programming language now available would best fit Jef Raskin's ideals? Arguably, Python won --- would the Pythonic way of doing things have won him over?

Most Pascal criticisms are already addressed in Modula-2 (1978), that is one of the reasons Niklaus Wirth created it.

Pascal was designed for learning, whereas Modula-2 was designed to be an industrial language with support for systems programming.

Also note that Apple is actually one of the companies that pushed UCSD Pascal extensions, created Clascal and eventually gave birth to Object Pascal.

Which was picked by Borland, and having Object Pascal compilers available at low cost was basically one of the reasons why Modula-2 had a hard time gaining adoption on PC and Apple worlds.

    "stressed" [8..1]
    desserts

Beautiful. Far more so than Python’s "stressed"[::-1] (which I also think is very neat.)

Oddly given the comments on Pascal it reminds me most of Pascal’s range syntax. I love its ranges and sets.

> Beautiful. Far more so than Python’s "stressed"[::-1]"

“stressed" [8..1]” Looks better, but IMO is worse, as it requires you to know the length of the string. Change the string and forget to update the indexing expression and you’ve got a (possibly silent) bug.

Having said that, Python IMO may be too powerful here, allowing, for example

   "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”[-5:10:-3]

   'vspm'

Makes perfect sense (from the fifth character from the end, step back 3 characters at a time until you reach the 10th character), but may be too cryptic for some.

Every time I see a manipulation like that, I yearn for LISP and CAR and CDR and so forth...

Meh, I prefer (reverse "stressed") myself. Say what you mean!

This reminds me of Frink https://frinklang.org/ which cleverly carries units through calculations. It borrows from many other languages and has some "clear text" commands like parent post, but it's emphasis on unit consistency helps avoid conversion slop.

_That_ is _very_ cool, esp. that it can make images (in SVG). I don't suppose anyone has implemented it (or something similar) in a language other than Java?

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