Alan, Your memory for great dissertations is amazing. I don't think the Phil Abrams APL machine was ever actually built but It had some really good techniques for making APL efficient colorfully named "beating" and "drag-along".
-djl On Jun 5, 2011, at 7:50 PM, Alan Kay wrote: > I think this one was derived from Phil Abrams' Stanford (and SLAC) PhD thesis > on dynamic analysis and optimization of APL -- a very nice piece of work! > (Maybe in the early 70s or late 60s?) > > Cheers, > > Alan > > From: David Pennell <[email protected]> > To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> > Sent: Sun, June 5, 2011 7:33:40 PM > Subject: Re: Terseness, precedence, deprogramming (was Re: [fonc] languages) > > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
