counting on your digits

I'm sort of an in-betweener here, rather than a certified Old CyberFogie. I started programming long before BASIC, but sometime later than when people programmed in octal by flicking switches on a 1401. At the University of Maryland in the sixties, we used MAD, the Michigan Algorithmic Decoder, as an ALGOL- or FORTRAN-like language, and SNOBOL, a string-manipulation language that was more interesting than COBOL (but had similar arithmetic limitations). All punched cards, of course.

One inst...