> On Nov 27, 2018, at 9:23 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>> I have long wondered if there are computer languages that aren't rooted
>>> in English / ASCII. I feel like it's rather pompous to assume that all
>>> programming languages are rooted in English / ASCII. I would hope that
>>> there are programming languages that are more specific to the region of
>>> the world they were developed in. As such, I would expect that they
>>> would be stored in something other than ASCII.
>
> On Tue, 27 Nov 2018, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote:
>> APL.
>
> APL requires adding additional characters. That was a major obstacle to
> acceptance, both in terms of keyboard and type ball (my use preceded CRT),
> but also asking the user/programmer to learn new characters. I loved APL!
I learned it about 15 years ago (OpenAPL, running on a Solaris workstation with
a modified Xterm that handled the APL characters). Nice. It made a handy tool
for some cryptanalysis programs I needed to write.
I wonder if current APL implementations use the Unicode characters for APL,
that would make things easy.
> I love the use of an arrow for assignment. ...
One of the strangest programming languages I've used is POP-2, which we used in
an AI course (Expert Systems) at the University of Illinois, in 1976. Taught
by a visiting prof from the University of Edinborough, I think Donald Mickie
but I may have the name confused.
Like APL, POP-2 had the same associativity for all operators. Unlike APL, the
designers decided that the majority should win so assignment would be
left-associative like everything else -- rather than APL's rule that all the
other operators are right-associative like assignment. So you'd end up with
statements like:
n + 1 -> n
More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POP-2
paul
