APL\360

[Boris Gimbarzevsky]

Thanks for the link.  Coincidentally, recently while going through my 
ancient Calgary printouts, found a few small APL programs I wrote in 
1968 or 1969.  There was an APL system being trialed at UofCalgary 
and a group of us had a chance to play around with it for a few 
hours.  It was very novel back then to have immediate results of a 
program instead of 24-48 hour turnaround for a batch FORTRAN job.  It 
was an easy language to learn but recall just writing a few simple 
one or two line programs and essentially using it as a sophisticated 
calculator to get immediate results for a physics problem.

Glad to see that APL manuals now online and can now decode what I was 
trying to do on those printouts with APL hieroglyphics.  Reminds me a 
bit of FOCAL on PDP-8 which was used to quickly create throwaway 
programs that were just needed for a calculation that was too tedious 
to do by hand or with a slide rule but too simple to go through 
bother of writing a FORTRAN program.

>I was just poking around the computerhistory.org website, searching 
>for Knuth stuff.
>
>The second or third hit when I search for "Knuth" is this one: 
>https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/ 
>.  It's not just about APL, it actually has a downloadable copy of 
>the source code.  And it points to an executable version, apparently 
>a packaged up Hercules running that code.
>
>Nice.  I'll have to give it a try.
>
>         paul