HP had a version of APL in the early 80's that included "structured" conditional statements and where performance didn't depend on cramming your entire program into one line of code. Between the two, it was possible to create reasonably readable code. That version of APl also did some clever performance optimizations by manipulating array descriptors instead just using brute force.
APL was the first language other than Fortran that I learned - very eye opening. -david On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi David > > I've always been very fond of APL also -- and a slightly better and more > readable syntax could be devised these days now that things don't have to be > squeezed onto an IBM Selectric golfball ... > > Cheers, > > Alan > > ------------------------------ > *From:* David Leibs <[email protected]> > *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> > *Sent:* Sun, June 5, 2011 7:06:55 PM > *Subject:* Re: Terseness, precedence, deprogramming (was Re: [fonc] > languages) > > I love APL! Learning APL is really all about learning the idioms and how > to apply them. This takes quite a lot of training time. Doing this kind > of training will change the way you think. > > Alan Perlis quote: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about > programming, is not worth knowing." > > There is some old analysis out there that indicates that APL is naturally > very parallel. Willhoft-1991 claimed that 94 of the 101 primitives > operations in APL2 could be implemented in parallel and that 40-50% of APL > code in real applications was naturally parallel. > > R. G. Willhoft, Parallel expression in the apl2 language, IBM Syst. J. 30 > (1991), no. 4, 498–512. > > > -David Leibs > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > >
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