APL\360

[Fred Cisin]

On Thu, 14 Jan 2021, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> It's a different world from BASIC, for sure.
>
> Neil maintained that its strength lay in thinking about things in a
> non-scalar way.  I'll give him that--programming on STAR, where a scalar
> was treated by the hardware as a vector of length 1 (and thus very slow
> because of startup overhead) certainly led you toward thinking about
> things in vector operations, just like APL.
>
> Here's the APL*STAR reference manual:
>
> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Books/197409_APL%20Star%20Reference%20Manual_19980800B.pdf

Thank you for that!

You are right.  At the time, it simply never occured to me that anybody 
would use it for anything other than matrix processing of scientific data.
(MY view of the elephant)


Yes, I suppose that somebody of sufficient skill COULD write accounting 
software with it, . . .
But why?


And, one of the advantages of COBOL for business programming was the 
possibility of checking somebody else's code.  APL was intrinsically 
obfuscated code.