On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 at 13:11, Peter Corlett via cctalk <[email protected]> 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... -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [email protected] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
