Chris Burke wrote: > I don't think Mathematica had any influence on J, though perhaps APL had > a minor influence on Mathematica.
Mathematica was directly inspired by APL in certain operations, notably Map, Apply, Scan and Fold. Early versions of the Mathematica documentation contained a lot of references to APL: these have decreased over time. Much of the symbolic programming in Mathematica comes from Macsyma, in particular the ideas of many different types for mathematical expressions assembled in a directed acyclic graph; the functional programming idea of remembering the result of every functional evaluation; and a knowledge base of rules and heuristics for simplification of expressions. These types of operations have no equivalent in APL or J, and there has been little cross-pollination. Mathematica (like everyone else) relies on LAPACK and other Fortran libraries for hard-core numerical calculations. Best wishes, John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
