> APL is still heavily used by insurance companies to calculate their > non-standard insurances for large companies, where the normal routines > won't work due to special conditions etc.
Also in a lot of the financial services companies. I remember a presentation from Jeff Savit while he was still at Merrill Lynch about supporting some of their real-time brokerage apps which were completely done in VS APL on VM. A few years back, but I remember being really impressed that something that complicated could actually be written in APL. I'm not sure how much of that code survives, but if you wanted to give a broker the ability to do some really powerful math on returns or such in very few keystrokes, APL would be exactly the right tool to do it. > APL development is very fast compared to other (compiled) languages. > I don't do it myself, but I am told so by lots of colleagues. For what it was designed to do, APL is very, very powerful (eats big numeric problems for breakfast, and it's unbelievably concise). It's biggest flaws (and IMHO, the things that killed it) were the requirement for custom symbol sets on displays and the inability to discuss programming in it without having a standard method to note the symbols in environments without the special symbol sets. It'd be less of a problem today with the prevalence of pixel-addressible displays, but at that time, Mathematica and Macsyma were a lot easier to use and implement, and didn't require special (and expensive) terminals. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
