Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
Wed Nov 28 01:04:55 CST 2018


>> 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.



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