APL\360

[Liam Proven]

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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