Re: direction
- Posted by Everett Williams <rett at GVTC.COM> Mar 22, 2000
- 497 views
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