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Comment by hbarka | Hacker News Reader

There’s em dashes in that 1978 article.

The typed original [1] has double hyphens that have been converted to dashes. His typewriter (Hermes Ambassador) was fixed pitch.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd06xx/EWD667.PDF

Wasnt the original famously in written with Fountain pen? And the typed out version reproduced much later?

He typed them until 1979 when his typewriter stopped working correctly.

Well - in this case the EWD in TFA - has a footer that says.

    transcribed by Tristram Brelstaff
    revised Fri, 19 Nov 2010

And so seem to be the case with most of the other EWDs I looked at as well.

That's the HTML version, which Dijkstra did not himself produce. People took the handwritten and typed EWDs and transcribed them for the web. If you look at the PDF scan of the source document for this one it was not transcribed by Tristram Brelstaff, it was typed by Dijkstra.

His namesake algo was also written entirely in his head in about 20 minutes at a coffee shop! https://harlepengren.com/dijkstras-algorithm-20-minutes/

I'm not native speaker but the TOC smells llm to me

Yeah looks like it. Was just trying to search up a writeup of it, was pretty sure I remembered reading that a while ago.

Luca Cardelli created the handwritten typeface Dijkstra font in the late 1980s, to mimic the distinctive and precise handwriting of his colleague Edsger W. Dijkstra.

It shipped as a free PostScript font with NeWS:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/fonts/Dijkstra.ps

https://lucacardelli.name/indexartifacts.html

(You have to click on the "Fonts" tab, there's no direct link to it.)

Dijkstra [.ttf (2013 updated version by Reuben Thomas)] [.zip (old PC)] [.hqx (old Mac)] [Preview.pdf]

A beautiful handwriting font of unknown origin, first popularized by E.W.Dijkstra. Excellent for slides that appear to be carefully written, and for short, deep technical notes.

https://lucacardelli.name/Artifacts/Fonts/Pc/dijkstra.ttf

https://lucacardelli.name/Artifacts/Fonts/Pc/Dijkstra.zip

https://lucacardelli.name/Artifacts/Fonts/Mac/Dijkstra.sea.h...

https://lucacardelli.name/Artifacts/Fonts/Dijkstra.pdf

Oh look at the last paragraph on the first page. Manually justified:

           In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been
    proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native
    tongues.  This would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated,
    but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the
    burden, life would become easier for us.  It sounds sensible provided you
    blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your dif-
    ficulties.

How does one even achieve that with a manual typewriter?

It's coincidence in this case. Proportional typewriters were made but this wasn't one of them.

It can only mean one thing.

Get out the Binford 6000, it's Tool Time?

It's not just em dashes, it's 1: typewriter em dashes aka `--` and 2: usage of them in pairs, like parenthesis, that is completely different from how LLMs use them.

Proof that Djikstra was an AI model!

Literally stop the presses

Unreadable.

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