8 hours ago
- Jef Raskin proposed a 'calculator language' for the early Macintosh, intended as a programming language but focused on calculator-like left-to-right evaluation.
- He criticized existing languages like BASIC, Fortran, PL/1, Pascal, and Lisp, but praised APL for its elegance, even though APL proved to be a dead-end.
- The language features strict left-to-right evaluation, clumps (groups of numbers), negative numbers with underscore, and various operators and functions.
- A working implementation of the language was built by Claude Opus 5, based on Raskin's original spec, with a few deviations from the primer's examples.
- The language is described as refreshingly simple, with unique constructs like 'TOTHE' for exponentiation, 'MOD', 'MIN', 'MAX', and 'INSERT' for operations on clumps.