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Re: Long names are doom ?
Is it because the APL character set does not replicate well in ASCII? :-)
When I studied APL I recall using identifiers like A and B. Has this
situation improved, or are APL programs so short and readable that
meaningful identifiers are not an issue?
I remember at the time it was a dead cool language, and I could do reporting
things with it that seemed to horrify the FORTRAN programmers of the world,
but that was on a mainframe 20 years ago.
APL always seemed to me to be the ideal macro language for spreadsheets,
although nobody else seems to have picked up on this :-) I realize that
this is likely a FAQ, but are there free or open-source APL implementations
available? (Although I realize it will never be the same without an AJ510
keyboard)
Also, I seem to recall an interesting relationship between APL and Lisp, but
I don't recall exactly what it is. I suppose it has something to do with
functional programming...wasn't APL originally a specification language for
Lisp programs?
[p.s. I've removed comp.lang.c at the risk of annoying the rest of the
non-APLers this time...hey, how come comp.lang.fortran is not on the
distribution list? I suspect this a trick by fortran programmers to make the
rest of us unproductive, since that was who started the thread in the first
place!]
Cheers,
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Travers" <ktravers@zeta.org.au>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c,comp.lang.apl,comp.lang.dylan,comp.lang.clos,comp.lang.smalltalk
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 6:10 AM
Subject: Re: Long names are doom ?
> I'm not normally one to complain, but I have to say this thread has become
> very difficult to read (from an APL viewpoint) because most of the items
> DO NOT RELATE TO APL.
>
> I have limited time (and I read slowly). Does anyone else share my
concern?
>
> Ken Travers.
References: