On Oct 5, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Curtis A. Jones wrote:
Bob, Indeed! You should have heard Gene's first pass at his paper on developing a one-line game of Life. This was an APL BUG meeting in which the story of someone seeing a game of Life in Tex (or Postscript?) led to sending an APL version to people at I.P. Sharp and how that led to a half dozen iterations - each improvement inspiring other improvements. It's in the paper, but I don't think it stands out there as well as it did when Gene first told about it at the meeting. Curtis --- Robert Bernecky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You're thinking of a paper I gave at APL88, entitled "Life: Nasty, Brutish and Short". The conference was held in Sydney, Australia. It began with a very long version, but I only started counting at a translation of a program in Knuth's Metafont book. With a little help from my friends, and a lot from Roger Hui, I was able to reduce it to 9 tokens, which I claimed was nasty, brutish and short, consisting of 9 tokens.
This conference is more important because after it was over I stimulated Ken to realize that it was possible to write a fork (f + g) x as (f + g) x.
There was an initial fight by people who wanted to know "where is the function?"
At that time, APL had symbols for functions, such as rotate, reverse, and so forth, and it took a while before the dust settled and people began using forks in lots of different ways. I believe that Roger Hui has an analysis of fork that showed that it was extremely useful; the example most often used was this, for "average" : (+ / % #).
Eugene ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
