APL was terse.
You could do amazing things with very short source code.
Extremely well suited for scientific programming.
(I used it on a timesharing terminal at Goddard Space Flight Center half a
century ago)
It had a lot of operators. So much so that it had to expand the character
set. Typically, it was used on a Selectric based terminal, with a special
type-ball, and added labels pasted on the keys.
Unlike English based languages, such as FORTRAN or COBOL, anybody other
than an APL programmer could not even guess what a line of APL did.
As a FIRST language, it had a first day steep learning curve learning new
operators. But, also, as a FIRST language, it was nice that it used an
arrow, rather than an "equals sign" for assignment.
I remember a cartoon in Datamation?? 4 decades ago, of some egyptologists
looking at some hieroglyphics and declaring, "It looks like a subset of
APL"
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
