From Newsgroup: comp.lang.misc

| The historical "Apple Calculator Language," laid out by Jef Raskin in
| his October 13, 1979 memo at Apple, was designed to completely rethink
| how humans interact with machines. His guiding principle was to elimi-
| nate rigid computer syntax and mathematical hierarchies so users could
| talk to the calculator in standard prose or sentences.
|
| The original Stanford archive documents and emulator implementations
| demonstrate how this unique left-to-right logic worked in practice:
|
| 1. Left-to-Right Processing (No Precedence)
|
| Traditional math uses PEMDAS (multiplication before addition).
| Raskin's language intentionally stripped this out to make parsing
| purely chronological from left to right.
|
| Input 6 / 3 + 2 * 5
|
| How standard math reads it (6/3) + (2*5) = 2 + 10 = 12
|
| - How Raskin's language reads it: 6 / 3 is 2. Then 2 + 2 is 4. Then
| 4 * 5 is 20.
|
| 2. Conversational Prose and Ignored Words
|
| You could type full conversational sentences. The system was designed
| to search exclusively for numbers and math symbols while gracefully
| ignoring the human "filler" words.
|
| Input What is 2 + 3 please?
|
| Output 5
|
| Input If I have 100 apples and subtract 20 how many are left?
|
| Output 80
|
| 3. "Clumps" (Array Math)
|
| Instead of executing complex loops, Raskin borrowed a concept from the
| APL programming language where a list or "clump" of numbers could be
| calculated simultaneously.
|
| Input 1..9 * 13
|
| Output 13 26 39 52 65 78 91 104 117
|
| (It automatically treated 1..9 as a collective clump of numbers 1
| through 9 and multiplied each by 13).
|
| 4. Text and Slicing Manipulations
|
| The language treated text characters much like sequences of numbers,
| allowing you to manipulate strings using coordinate-like indexing
| ranges.
|
| Input "stressed" [8..1]
|
| Output desserts
|
| (The code [8..1] instructed the system to reverse the 8-letter word by
| pulling characters from the eighth slot down to the first).
|
| 5. Inline Text Commentary
|
| If you actually wanted to write an explicit note to yourself that the
| calculator wouldn't try to read as mathematical variables, you wrapped
| it in curly brackets.
|
| Input 45 * 1.08 {plus local sales tax}
|
| Output 48.6
|
| Raskin eventually left Apple in 1982 due to clashes with Steve Jobs
| over the direction of the Macintosh project. However, he later inte-
| grated these highly intuitive, text-centric calculator philosophies
| directly into his next major hardware creation, the Canon Cat.

Lines marked with "| " come from my editing, where I start by writing
prompts for the chatbot and then edit the generated texts and format
them for USENET.


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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.misc

On 30 Jul 2026 14:14:37 GMT
ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote:

Lines marked with "| " come from my editing, where I start by writing
prompts for the chatbot and then edit the generated texts and format
them for USENET.

What's the formatting for lines which have been verified to be free of "hallucinations?"

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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.misc

On 30/07/2026 22:19, John Ames wrote:

On 30 Jul 2026 14:14:37 GMT
ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote:

Lines marked with "| " come from my editing, where I start by writing
prompts for the chatbot and then edit the generated texts and format
them for USENET.

What's the formatting for lines which have been verified to be free of "hallucinations?"

Well it could have been no different from a ghost-writer except that by
saying he was just the editor and prompter, he's disauthored the monograph.

We do not know whether it was a tool in his possession (local chatbot)
leaving him still the author or a monograph authoring service provider
like openai, google, or duck.ai that authored it. We can't use it. The
annoying thing is that the disauthorship was in the back-matter rather
than front-matter so we read part of it thinking Stefan Ram is author.
--
Tristan Wibberley

The message body is Copyright (C) 2026 Tristan Wibberley except
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of course, cite it academically giving credit to me, distribute it
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