On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 9:06 AM, bob gailer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<< SNIP >> >> I'm glad to see Iverson amongst Babbage and Whitehead. > > Turing Award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought. > >> In 1974 I was >> introduced to his invention: APL. That transformed how I thought about >> problems and expressed algorithms. I still wish for some way to bring some >> of that magic into Python. > > See NumPy and SciPy, which used APL for some design ideas. If we can > get some people together on this idea, we can add more APL to Python. > > Perl6 will have some of this, but that's a knotty business that I am > staying out of. > > I'm working on getting a GPLed APL for the OLPC XO. Arthur Whitney is > writing one. I was the founder of I-APL, Ltd, and Managing Editor of > APL News for Springer-Verlag. I have the copyrights on Iverson's > textbooks for Arithmetic, Algebra, and Calculus, and intend to put > them out under Creative Commons licenses. > > I need to recruit more people--mathematicians, teachers, APLers, and > others--to work on these projects. > I see Python as a lot like APL, in terms of small, action-packed units, e.g. data structures, with highly orthogonal (combinatorially rich) behaviors. I've worked with Iverson on J, admire Roger Hui's math teaching in that language. APL was a first love thought, showed me that not every language is like FORTRAN, praise Allah. http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/cp4e.html is mostly Python, but there's some J there too. In my model intro class, I envision Python and J as a "dynamic duo" in that they give students a sense of the spectrum, the broad range among computer languages -- not saying other dynamic duos not up to the job, go for it etc. Kirby _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
