27 Nov
2018
27 Nov
'18
11:04 p.m.
> Why not a language even more self-documenting than
COBOL, wherein the main
> body is text, and special markers to identify the CODE that corresponds?
On
Wed, 28 Nov 2018, Sean Conner wrote:
In the book _Programmers at Work_ there's a
picture of a program Jef
Raskin [1] wrote that basically embeds BASIC into a word processor document.
[1] He started the Macintosh project at Apple. It was later taken over
by Steve Jobs and taken in a different direction.
He also created the Canon Cat.
His idea of a user interface included that the program should KNOW
(assume) what the user wanted to do.
I showed him WHY the OS shouldn't go ahead (without asking for
confirmation!) and format a disk that it couldn't read. I do not know
whether that change got made before commercial release.
(The Cat, incidentally, was SS 512 bytes per sector, with 10 sectors per
track. Sometimes described as 256K (because use was primarily for
imaging 256K of RAM), but sometimes [more accurately] as 384K)
Before his death, I almost ended up with his electric van (Subaru 600
based). There was not enough computational capability in it for that to
be on-topic here.