Playing around with the PDP-10 ITS (Incompatible Time Sharing system) simulation that is used by the #PiDP 10 project.

Step 1: Try SCHEME (a LISP dialect).

OK, defining a function that squares numbers worked, but WHY??? does 5^2 come out as 31 ???
It took me a while to notice that this is "octal in - octal out". Yeah I guess to the early "hackers" at MIT the decimal notation was just too arbitrary and anthropocentric to justify the extra cycles it would take to deal with it.