Rediscovering Jef Raskin's Forgotten Apple Calculator Language
The Apple Calculator Language
I stumbled upon Jef Raskin's early proposal for a unique calculator language intended for the Macintosh. His critique of existing tools like BASIC and Pascal reveals a desire for simplicity over rigid structure. I built a working implementation to demonstrate its left-to-right evaluation and elegant handling of number clumps, proving its surprising appeal today.
BASIC is a very weak language, and is being shored up in many ad hoc ways. Any student of programming languages can easily poke holes in it.
- WillAdams
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?
- vintagedave
"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.
- mwexler
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.