On 1/14/21 6:42 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > 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.
APL was difficult for those used to traditional programming languages, not primarily because of the character set, but because it's basically a vector/matrix programming language. It's a different world from BASIC, for sure. Neil maintained that its strength lay in thinking about things in a non-scalar way. I'll give him that--programming on STAR, where a scalar was treated by the hardware as a vector of length 1 (and thus very slow because of startup overhead) certainly led you toward thinking about things in vector operations, just like APL. Here's the APL*STAR reference manual: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Books/197409_APL%20Star%20Reference%20Manual_19980800B.pdf --Chuck
