On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 2:39 PM, John Macdonald <j...@perlwolf.com> wrote: > Historically, the name reduce was used (first?) in APL, which also > provided it as a meta-operator. op/ would use op to reduce the array > on the right of the meta-operator.
It's quite possible that APL was the first use of the term "reduce" in that sense - I know that (reduce) didn't make it into LISP until relatively late, possibly not until Common Lisp. > APL was extremely terse, you could compute almost anything in a single line >- Perl golfing > afficionados have never really caught up, although with the addition > of Unicode operators Perl 6 could now go ahead.) Perhaps Perl 6 should not aspire to the expressiveness of APL. :) As nice as it is that you can write Conway's Life in a one-liner(*), I think that a little verbosity now and then is a good thing for legibility.... -- Mark J. Reed <markjr...@gmail.com> (*) life ←{↑1 ω⌵.^3 4=+/,‾1 0 1◦.ϕ⊂ω} I haven't tested it, but the above will allegedly compute the next generation from a Life configuration (input and output represented as a matrix of 1s and 0s).