29 Jan
2021
29 Jan
'21
7:19 a.m.
On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 at 13:11, Peter Corlett via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
It is *also* the use of symbols. Firstly, some people are just symbol-blind
and prefer stuff spelled out in words. It's just how brains are wired.
Agreed. I submit this is also why some people find Lisp (and perhaps
Forth and Postscript) straightforward, while to others it remains
ineffable.
It may
have even been inspired to do this by APL given the manual says Sinclair
BASIC was written by a "Cambridge mathematician".
Specifically, this one, I believe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Vickers_(computer_scientist)
Yes, well, a lot of BASIC programmers have even more
fundamental problems
with understanding important programming concepts, such as recursion
Good BASICs had that.
and
pointers/references.
... Fair. :-(
Modern x86-64 (and ARM etc) also (finally!) has useful
vector instructions.
Unfortunately, the popular languages do not make their use terribly simple,
and mostly rely on compilers recognising idiomatic loop patterns over
scalars and transforming them. This works about as well as you might expect.
Very interesting paper, IMHO:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
?
C Is Not a Low-level Language
Your computer is not a fast PDP-11.
?
It does imply the question, though, as to what a high-level language
designed for multithreaded partly-parallel CPUs with SIMD extensions
would look like, and whether this kind of logic is easily expressed
for people who do not have an APL sort of mind...
--
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