12 Sep
2007
12 Sep
'07
12:51 p.m.
On Wednesday 12 September 2007 15:41, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I think what militated against APL aside from the
strange character
set was the proliferation of very terse programs; the one-liner seems
to be a mark of pride for the APL clan.
The strange character set was definitely off-putting, for sure. I remember
running across some implementation of it a while back, whether it was early
peecee or prior to that I don't recall. But it wasn't something I was gonna
mess with unless I could get a keyboard with those characters on it. :-)
Kind of the same way I feel about that Dvorak keyboard layout -- I'd love to
work with that a while, but not without the right keycaps while I learned
it. Keyboard layout-changing software just wasn't gonna cut it...
If I wrote C the way those folks write APL, no one
could understand my code.
Which brings to mind the "obfuscated C contest". I wonder if that's still
ongoing?
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin