Thanks for the link. Coincidentally, recently while going through my
ancient Calgary printouts, found a few small APL programs I wrote in
1968 or 1969. There was an APL system being trialed at UofCalgary
and a group of us had a chance to play around with it for a few
hours. It was very novel back then to have immediate results of a
program instead of 24-48 hour turnaround for a batch FORTRAN job. It
was an easy language to learn but recall just writing a few simple
one or two line programs and essentially using it as a sophisticated
calculator to get immediate results for a physics problem.
Glad to see that APL manuals now online and can now decode what I was
trying to do on those printouts with APL hieroglyphics. Reminds me a
bit of FOCAL on PDP-8 which was used to quickly create throwaway
programs that were just needed for a calculation that was too tedious
to do by hand or with a slide rule but too simple to go through
bother of writing a FORTRAN program.
I was just poking around the computerhistory.org website, searching
for Knuth stuff.
The second or third hit when I search for "Knuth" is this one:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/
. It's not just about APL, it actually has a downloadable copy of
the source code. And it points to an executable version, apparently
a packaged up Hercules running that code.
Nice. I'll have to give it a try.
paul
