[cctalk] Re: APL (Was: BASIC

> APL was incredible.  I was amazed.  I was immediately able to do a few > simple things that were useful for my boss and myself, and writing > simple programs within hours.  Its matrix arithmetic was awesome. APL > typeball on a selectric terminal at GSFC, . . . > Some of the keys were re-labeled, but there was a chart on the wall of > which keyboard characters were which APL symbols.

It was indeed. It was also one of the first languages implemented on a microprocessor-based personal computer system. (MCM-70). To me, APL is logical--strict right-to-left precedence; simple array and matrix operations. I've long wondered if we introduced students to APL as a first language, what our applications code would look like today. My friend Bruce, called it "That Iverson Language". It's interesting to note that the Iverson book was published in 1962, but an implementation (under 7090 IBSYS) didn't come about until 1965, although preliminary implementation as PAT had been done on a 1620 (!) in 1963.