I don't know if the APL forum is a better place to talk J than the J forum to talk APL but quickly:
APL has many variants. Some APLs are J like and no not strand items as in nouns A B C together. Other APLs (most) do. Some APLs like Dyalog offer namespaces, something like locales but they can be nested and be used for a number of things like interfacing with .Net, COM, GUI, etc. It is also truly Object Oriented (not simulated) thanks to namespaces again. In general the 2 are very similar and immediately the most noticeable difference is the charater set. Which is fully Unicode in Dyalog's case. Following is the IDE. Some APL offer rich development environments with editors, syntax coloring, user friendly debuggers, workspace explorer, etc. Language wise many of J features are missing in APL (e.g. almost all the [letter]. verbs) but Dyalog now has trains (forks and hooks), @, rank, key, etc. thanks to Roger. One thing it has that J doesn't have is threads. On Thursday, July 31, 2014 1:53:42 AM, Jon Hough <[email protected]> wrote: Although I no zero APL, I understand that J was born from APL with an ASCII character set and some ideas from Backus' languages. And I am aware many J programmers are also APL programmers. So do modern APL dialects provide any functionality not included in J? For example, or counterexample, I do not think APL has forks and hooks, Which add a lot of flexibility to J. The point of the question, being blunt but not wanting to offend anyone, is there any technical reason one might choose to write a new app in APL rather than J? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
