Looking for something else, I came across this account of the early development of AppleScript. In the screen shot at the top, I was struck by item -3 in list Engineering. I don’t think I have that syntax right, but you get the idea:
http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/11/21_AppleScript.html
Probably everyone here knows about this already, but I didn’t. There’s a long history embedded in the amazingly wonderful Script Debugger.