On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 04:26:10PM -0700, Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
> Hi Hendrik
> Ivor's son took over from his Dad.  J has loops, has transitioned to an ascii 
> keyboard, supports gui and large large arrays. It has shared variables etc. 
> etc. etc. 
> 
> Search for J programming.  FOSS 

I believe some of the work on J was done at Queen's.  The ascii 
character made it more accessible on the I/O devices of the time, but 
destroyed its elegant appearance.  Character set matters.

> But I still love APL.

It was a beautiful langauge design, very effective on a restricted 
domain.

> (my first real productivity language)  (I worked 
> in an IBM shop with system programmers and their love of TSO)  I was 
> able to solve problems related to operations, often in hours, while 
> they took the afternoon to spec out the program.

I encountered it at the University of Waterloo, another IBM shop, long 
before TSO.  It was a beautiful piece of work.  Unfortunately, though, 
it was the only tool available for interactive programming, so it got 
used for lots of stuff it wasn't well suited for.

> I would say I was 10x faster and as accurate at solving their problems. 
> APL is interpreted.

Interpretation wasn't a problem on the kind of problems APL was designed 
for, because the productive time soen in the matrix operations dwarfed 
the interpretation overhead.

> Has debug and trace functions.  There is an apl 
> for linux. 

I  expect there would be.

-- hendrik
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