[RC] Week #5: Taking time to deliberate on my coding project

03 May, 2026 #rc, #coding-retreat, #snippets

Context about what “Recursers” do day-to-day

See my Week #2 snippet for details. Here’s a LinkedIn short video where Nicholas (RC CEO) explains it really clearly.

Week 5 Progress

My initial plan for learning Zig was to write a calculator app that supports arbitrary-precision arithmetic. The starting point was this article about the Android calculator app. The goal was to re-implement the calculator written by Hans Boehm in Zig. That led me on a trail all the way to the Principia Mathematica book. I’ve added a list of links to papers below.

After a few weeks of digging into papers, I realized I needed a more tangible target, which pointed me toward the origins of UNIX. UNIX has two calculator tools—bc and its predecessor, dc. Both are gems of UNIX history:

dc is the oldest surviving Unix language program.

The dc calculator has the key feature I’m looking to learn: how to do arbitrary-precision math from scratch.

There are two implementations derived from BSD that I’m currently aware of (GNU has its own, but I don’t have a good source reference for it):

OpenBSD by Otto Moerbeek — CVS repo for dc
MacOS by Gavin D. Howard — GitHub repo for both bc and dc

Aside from deliberating on my coding project, I’m happy that I’ve started talking more to folks at RC. I really enjoyed the “Volition” workshop. I had never encountered that word, “volition,” before; honestly, in my 20+ years of speaking and reading the English language, it never came up, or at least I don’t recall it.

Challenges

I was reminded again that immigration is hard – specifically, how certain tasks are actually multi-step projects with circular dependencies and blockers.

It’s turtles calculators all the way down

A trail of research papers (links point to PDFs) I followed :