On Mar 25, 8:58 am, Sean Corfield <seancorfi...@gmail.com> wrote: > My final year project at university was to write an APL interpreter > (in Pascal, back in '83). APL is a fun language. I haven't looked at J > (yet).
Awesome! J is APL, but totally "modernized." Everything you would expect in a functional language (currying, first class functions, anonymous functions, composition, etc) and even more things, like hooks, trains, forks, not needing to refer to variables explicitly, etc. Sort of scary, when you think of what you could do with ancient APL. One other difference with APL is that they removed the old complaint of "special characters and keyboards" by changing it to pure standard ascii characters. Thing is, I don't particularly like this aspect. I much prefer old APL symbols to the new string of plain ascii characters which I find ugly. The irony in all of this is that Iverson was before his time in creating a language with special symbols - some people didn't "get it," you needed special equipment and character sets and fonts, etc. So they removed this old complaint with J... just with the advent of unicode, which actually allows for such things quite easily. In other words, the language was ahead of its time, and devolved a step backwards to address complaints just as the times caught up, heh. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
