APL\360

[Fred Cisin]

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