14 Jan
2021
14 Jan
'21
7:31 p.m.
> APL was terse.
On Fri, 15 Jan 2021, Mark
Linimon wrote:
That's a nice way of saying "It was a
write-only language".
Even back when my brain still worked 100% I could only remember what
the code I had just written actually _did_ for 24-48 hours. After
that it was easier to rewrite from scratch.
It was, indeed, a "write-only language", although I didn't have difficulty
reading my own code for a year. Who else could read it? Presumably
nobody.
Whereas, a COBOL or FORTRAN program is potentially readable by any COBOL
or FORTRAN programmer.
But, in calling it "terse", I also meant that the source code density was
extraordinarily high. Thousands of lines of other languages could be done
in dozens of lines of APL, unlike the verbosity of other "high level
languages". Which, of course, substantially reinforced its opacity to any
but the programmer.
But, when using it instead of a calculator for one-time processing
(programs that were not intended to be reused in the future),
nothing could compare for inverting a matrix, etc.
"I want you to give me a least squares curve fit of E Vs L for this subset
of the data", . . .
'Course, when I questioned the use of two decimal digits for year in our
datafiles (National Space Sciences Data Center, building 26 GSFC), I was
assured that "NONE of what we do now has any possibility of being used
again in 30 years!" And, THAT was the true Y2K problem.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com