That elicited a bit of nostalgia for me.
The first public announcement of "execute" (which first appeared in IBM
APLSV) was made at APL-73 in Toronto. Jim Ryan of Burroughs announced in
his vendor booth that execute was already implemented and running in his
system, demonstrating it on a live terminal in the booth. That caused
some smart ass (likely from IBM, but I don't remember who it was) to
type in the expression you state below. As I recall, it didn't die
politely (or verbosely ... )
On 2013/10/05 16:00 , Edward Mokurai Cherlin wrote:
As an aside, I won a joke programming contest run by Stan Kelly-Bootle
by citing the Morgan-Stanley implementation. The challenge was to
create the largest ratio of error text to code size. I won with the
APL equivalent of
execute x gets 'execute x'
which fills memory with stack frames until it reaches WS FULL, and
then reports the state of the entire stack. It can be used to test the
WS FULL implementation and stack handling of APL implementations.
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