On 12 Sep 2007 at 18:40, Liam Proven wrote:
I find this very frightening.
When I worked with the STAR-100 vector machine, a few people were
aware that there was an APL for the machine (a natural fit, given the
instruction set), but I was hard put to even come up with a manual
for it.
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. If I wrote C the way those
folks write APL, no one could understand my code.
In truth, APL is very elegant. One of my profs in school insisted on
illustrating his algorithms with bits of APL, so I was forced to
laarn it. Unfortunately, on a machine with 6-bit characters,
programming in real life looks a lot less elegant than it does on
paper.
Cheers,
Chuck