numbo-digitized

Numbo source, digitized

This directory contains a subset of the original source files for Numbo, as digitized from this printout.

about the digitization process

The digitization took place through three passes: a rough automatic OCR pass, then two cleanup passes by a human. These aimed to preserve the source as it was, for reference purposes, without modernizing it or otherwise removing its idiosyncrasies.

That said, a few exceptions and judgement calls are worth mentioning:

• to aid in cross-referencing between the source files and the scanned pages, the page headers were included in the source files as garish banners:

  ;;
  ;; Jun 24 08:56 1987  init.l Page 3
  ;;
  

• some scanned pages contain overstruck or otherwise superfluous characters — especially 'o' and 'e' in codelets.l. These have been removed.

• a few lines ran off the right side of the scanned page — for instance, read-target in codelets.l. These have been reconstructed from context.

does it run?

Unfortunately, no.

First, the source code relies on features of a now-unavailable Common Lisp implementation. For Numbo to run on a typical contemporary Lisp implementation, the graphics code would need to be ported to a cross-platform library, and the use of Flavors should be ported to CLOS. These are similar changes to those needed by Copycat.

Second, the source files in the scan are not sufficient for reconstructing the whole program. At the very least, the coderack-specific code appears to be missing (cr-hang, cr-choose, etc.).