APL\360

APL was terse. You could do amazing things with very short source code. Extremely well suited for scientific programming. (I used it on a timesharing terminal at Goddard Space Flight Center half a century ago) It had a lot of operators. So much so that it had to expand the character set. Typically, it was used on a Selectric based terminal, with a special type-ball, and added labels pasted on the keys. Unlike English based languages, such as FORTRAN or COBOL, anybody other than an APL programmer could not even guess what a line of APL did. As a FIRST language, it had a first day steep learning curve learning new operators. But, also, as a FIRST language, it was nice that it used an arrow, rather than an "equals sign" for assignment. I remember a cartoon in Datamation?? 4 decades ago, of some egyptologists looking at some hieroglyphics and declaring, "It looks like a subset of APL" -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com