"Life: Nasty, Brutish, and Short" can be found at http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Doc/Life
http://keiapl.info/rhui/remember.htm discusses forks at the paragraph that begins Ken and I had in mind to implement A Dictionary of APL [8] together with hooks and forks (phrasal forms) [20]. ----- Original Message ----- From: Eugene McDonnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Friday, October 5, 2007 18:27 Subject: [Jprogramming] Re: Idioms in programming languages To: Programming forum <[email protected]> > > 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
