Re: GNU APL versus 'tacit' style

[Chris Moller]

There's another language, J, created by the same guy who created APL, that's very APL-like but does have trains, forks, hooks, and so on.  I've looked at it in detail and concluded that while APL has a bit of a reputation as a write-only language, adding various tersifying constructs only makes that worse.  APL does indeed have a bit of a steep learning curve, but I found J to be worse--though I have to admit that the 40-year gap between my introductions to, respectively, APL and J may have been a factor in that.

On 2/24/21 3:30 PM, Russtopia wrote:

So far as I can tell, there's little if any performance advantage to be had by the use of tacit programming.  All it really seems to do is make your code look more mysterious--and therefore cooler--but at the expense of being harder to debug.

What is the general consensus among GNU APL users here on the newer 'tacit style' that seems so prevalent in many online APL resources nowadays? ('forks', 'trains', etc.)

As a new, inexperienced APLer, exploring a bit more with GNU APL, I wonder if it discourages people new to APL to find, as I have, that so many resources online appear to be quite Dyalog-focused so the examples do not work as presented within GNU APL. I am aware that GNU APL is an 'APL2' implementation for the most part, which is fine by itself and I think it is important to have this open-source, free implementation. However it concerns me somewhat that newcomers to GNU APL may be discouraged to find so many examples online that are incompatible. Perhaps if I were myself experienced enough, I would write a GNU APL equivalent to the 'APL cart' (aplcart.info <http://aplcart.info>) with a focus on translating common idioms from 'tacit style' to APL2 style. (Indeed, perhaps such resources exist and I apologize if I have merely not encountered them yet. I have yet to study in-depth the older 'Finn APL idiom library' and similar).

-Russ

As for adding tacit style to GNU APL, I do not advocate one way or the other, as I do not have sufficient experience for an informed opinion. How much value would the 'tacit' syntax bring to GNU APL? Would it even be possible to add without breaking APL2 conformance? I also see a lot of usage online of 'guards' within lambdas which GNU APL seems to lack -- would the language benefit from adding support for that or would many of you say it is just 'syntactic sugar'? Just some thoughts from an APL newcomer. I enjoy it, and am grateful to Dr. Sauermann et al. for their hard work.

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