I said

For a certain concrete thinker, I'm planning the following first program: Combine Macsyma's string manipulation functions, especially CARDINAL_STRING (12 -> "twelve") and ORDINAL_STRING (12 -> "twelfth") to make a FRACTION_STRING function (11/12 -> "eleven twelfths"). There are nice opportunities for bugs ("one twelfths", 1/2 -> "one second", 3 -> "three firsts")

This went great!! After he got those fixed and was sure it all worked, 3/2 -> "three halfs" and after the obvious fix, "three halvess". He *really* enjoyed that session. Richard Fateman added

You might be surprised to learn that speaking fractions is ambiguous.

30/400 and 34/100 are quite different numbers, but each can be pronounced thirty four hundredths Luckily, we dodged that one. It probably can't happen with reduced fractions anyway, but just for kicks: block([gcd:false,fancy_display:false], for x in [34/100,30/400] do print(x=number_string(x)))$ 34 --- = thirty-four one hundredths 100 30 --- = thirty four hundredths 400 --rwg TrimSpa armpits imparts partism RATSIMP