On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 11:06:51AM -0700, Leslie S Satenstein wrote: > > By the way, my very first great languaga was APL. (Dr Ken Iverson's > baby). I ate, slept, dreamed about APL based solutions to technical > problems. But eventually, we learn that one language is not enough. > I do miss APL, as it is truly for rapid design.
APL was wonderful idea -- provided what you had to do could be effectively expressed in matrices. The moment this didn't work properly, or you ran out of RAM, you were tossed to the world of go-tos. And you lost the speed you got from the Iverson algebra the moment you did this. And Iverson got really angry when I suggested that the language should have things like loops and if-then-else syntax. There has since been an effort generalizing the style of this algebra to other data structures. It's neat stuff. See if you can find Richard Bird's Theory of Lists. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
