Hi Ian!
Your subject line caught my eye... ;-) And since you're posting old news
about Dyalog APL to the J Chat forum, I feel it is my duty to respond with
an update (not that I want to argue with your choice of J if it feels
comfortable for what you are doing):
> J's portability between Windows, Mac and PDA alone sees to that for me.
OK, we don't have a "native" Mac version, but Dyalog APL does run on a Mac
in a variety of different ways (Under Wine and various Virtual Machine
frameworks). The same GUI is available on most platforms, so I think that
your ability to produce good looking and portable user interfaces using this
route should be no worse than using J - and could be significantly better
depending on what you are trying to do.
> Code written by people who didn't appreciate []ML<-3
OK, this DOES seem like an odd reason to switch to J ;-) (for those who do
now know, []ML<-3 puts Dyalog APL in "APL2 Compatibility Mode").
> []AV's are devastatingly different
True, but now that APL has "gone Unicode", []AV is just an obsolete
256-element character vector which is there in order to allow old code which
references it directly to continue working. Dyalog APL now probably has the
most complete (and "integrated") Unicode implementation of any array
language. Unlike in J (last time I looked), a Finn can just type:
'ä'='Säppäla'
0 1 0 0 1 0 0
> Code that needs frequent execution of B[a;b;c;d;e...]<-1 (uses lots of
memory ... etc)
These problems are now pretty much solved in Dyalog APL (SQUAD indexing has
been added to avoid the need for execute, and indexing has been rewritten to
be memory-efficient).
> Also I don't have a spare couple of grand to keep up with the latest
> releases of Dyalog APL and APL+Win -- but that's not the key issue
> because I could always find a customer to buy me the products I need.
A "non-commercial" Dyalog APL will set you back £50, and if you are only
doing a small amount of infrequent commercial work, you can pick the 2%
royalty agreement so that you have no up-front costs.
> No, the key issue for me is that I've written J code in Windows,
> including GUI code, transferred the files to the Mac, also to my HP
> iPAQ, an easy matter because they're ASCII txt files and it's just a
> case of moving the dongle... and the app works First Time.
Using text files to store APL code is becoming a common technique with
Dyalog APL too (and the system takes care of updating the script files when
you edit code while debugging - so you can do development both by editing
the scripts and using the system interactively).
> I could go on and on... This was back in the last century, and things may
have gotten better with APL since... but I doubt it's that better.
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGc9kruiLQ
Well, I don't think it was *that* bad to begin with, but I am happy that
some of your most important complaints seem to have been resolved. We've
certainly been busy!
> J is going to be my tool of choice.
I'm not trying to argue with that, just needed to set the record straight
(as I see it ;-) regarding some of the things you state are "wrong" with
APL.
> BTW who's seen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_APL_programming_language
I'd better take a look at that ... :-)
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