APL and descendants - was Re: If C is so evil why is it so successful?

dwight dkelvey at hotmail.com
Fri Apr 14 16:02:53 CDT 2017


To my knowledge, there is only one person that claims to

have a cartridge for the APL on the VideoBrain. He considers it

more valuable than gold and won't let anyone look at it or

dump its contents.

Such code running on a VideoBrain would surely warrant the /S

label for "Small".

Without some form of bank switching the resources of the VideoBrain

are minimal.

It has almost no RAM and the decoding has mirrored images through

the address space.

The F8 was clearly intended as an embedded controller similar to

the Rockwell PPS4.

Dwight



________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Eric Christopherson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2017 8:22:32 PM
To: Jecel Assumpcao Jr. via cctalk
Subject: Re: APL and descendants - was Re: If C is so evil why is it so successful?

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. via cctalk wrote:
> Toby Thain via cctalk wrote on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:34:08 -0400
> > On 2017-04-13 6:54 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> > > So, whence APL today?
> >
> > Still lives on -- Dyalog, J, K, etc. Recently discovered the #jsoftware
> > channel on Freenode for APL fans.
>
> I consider Matlab and Julia to be spiritual descendents of APL.
>
> One thing that hurt APL in early microcomputers was that they used text
> mode with the wrong font. I would also have guessed that Basic could
> work better in really limited hardware, but some early APL
> implementations were impressively frugal.

The VideoBrain home computer had something called APL/S, but I can't
find any information on how it differs from APL. Does anyone know?

--
        Eric Christopherson


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