> On May 2, 2024, at 3:50 PM, Lee Courtney via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> The first "professional software" I wrote (almost) out of University in
> 1979 was a package to emulate the mainframe APL\Plus file primitives on a
> CP/M APL variant. Used to facilitate porting of mainframe APL applications
> to microcomputers.
>
> I'm still an APL adherent since the late 1960s, but it was probably too
> heavy-weight, with obstacles noted elsewhere (character-set, radical
> programming paradigm), to be successful in the early days of
> microcomputing. Although the MCM-70 was an amazing feat of technology.
>
> Too bad because the language itself lends itself to learning by anyone with
> an understanding of high school algebra.
The one professional application APL I heard of was in a talk by Ron Rivest, at
DEC around 1982 or so. He described a custom chip he had built, a bignum ALU
(512 bits) to do RSA acceleration. The chip included a chunk of microcode, and
he mentioned that the microcode store layout was done by an APL program about
500 lines long. That raised some eyebrows...
Unless I lost it I still have the article somewhere: it's the cover story on
the inaugural issue of "Lambda" which later became "VLSI Design", a technical
journal about chip design.
My own exposure to APL started around 1998, when I decoded to try to use it for
writing cryptanalysis software. That was for a course in cryptanalysis taught
by Alex Biryukov at Technion and offered to remote students. The particular
exercise was solving an ADVFX cipher (see "The Code Breakers", the unabridged
hardcover, not the useless paperback). It worked too, and it took less than
100 lines.
paul
