Re: direction
Bernie Ryan wrote:
>APL -- A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
>
> Gee what a unique name for a computer langauge. That must be why hundreds
> of billons of users are using this language and all you need is the
> special keyboard or software drivers that can do over-strike characters.
> Now all I need is to get that old selectric terminal out and hooker up
> to the 1160.
The fact that APL still exists from the late 50's early 60's and has a
rather fanatical following (not unlike some other languages that we both
know about) makes it something that should not be scoffed at. It uses
implicit recursion, and as noted can handle operations on matrices in
three symbols that take about a page and a half in any other language
known to man(except for it's imitator, J). It is purely value oriented and
can pass results from one function to the next in a single statement in
a way that is very hard to follow. I don't like the language because my
brain regurgitates when I attempt to use recursive routines that are
explicit, much less implicit. My experience with recursive routines is that
they work like magic until errors occur in the recursion stack and then
debugging becomes virtually impossible. Of course, there is the
standard recursion failure caused by running out of resources or overflowing
a variable.....ad infinitum. Ugh. Also, recursion turns out to be very
difficult to optimize within compilers for reasons I don't quite understand...
since I really don't "get" recursion anyway. Maybe it's because it
is so poorly understood that just making it work is hard enough
without trying to optimize it.
As you can see, I am no fan of APL, but some of the very brightest who
have ever been in this field think very highly of it. I'll stick to Euphoria or
some other language that heads in it's direction and gets there faster...
which I haven't found yet.
Everett L.(Rett) Williams
rett at gvtc.com
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