On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 11:52:23AM -0400, Eric P. wrote: > > > APL was wonderful idea -- provided what you had to do could be > > effectively expressed in matrices. The moment this didn't work > > Why no waxing eloquent for C? I haven't heard APL mentioned in years. Though > perusing Wikipedia's APL page to refresh myself, I am amused in the context > of this thread to read: > > "In reality, most APL compilers translated source APL to a lower level > language such as C, leaving the machine-specific details to the lower level > compiler." > > Tee-hee.
I don't get the joke. It seems like a solid technical decision to me. Use an existing widespread technology to do what it is good at, and let your progeammers interface with a better tool. That's under the asusmption that it is a better tool, of course, and for some classes of problems, it is. Tyhe first APL implementation I ever used was an interpreter, ad got its speed because the indivieual operations were things like matrix products, which were big operations lovingly hand-coded in assembler. THe actual interpretation took no time at all compared with the matric operations. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
