On Sun, 22 Aug 2021, at 19:49, Bill Johnson wrote: > You claim to know of a 1 line APL super complex program but when > asked to prove it can’t.
What I actually said was: "A good case in point is that in APL a useful program can be written in one line." I /did not/ say that I knew of a (specific) 1 line super complex program, just indicating that useful one-liners exist in APL. I was merely suggesting that the number of lines in a program was not a good way of estimating complexity. The two examples I pointed you at on the APL wikipedia page are both (I think) good examples of how a single line of code can (a) do a lot, and (b) be hard to understand at a glance. Even if the individual APL operators (all those greek characters) were represented by operator names, or even function names (though they are not functions) I do not think anyone could guess what those lines do. There's a short line of code (only 17 characters!) that determines "all the prime numbers up to R". Search (for the text in quotes) on the quite long webpage at https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/ to see it, with an explanation there of how that program works. It's a whole lot less easy to understand than the equivalent written in, say COBOL. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
