🚀 go-pugleaf

Jim Giles:
   |> The advantage of an interactive session is that you don't have
   |> to go through the process of writing programs to solve simple
   |> problems.

   Ok.  I'll consider J for simple problems.  But it's hardly worth
   learning such an obscure language for such applications.  And the
   interaction you covet is a definite liability for large-scale
   programming tasks.

Well, at present (April 10, 1992), J's implementation is neither
complete enough or static enough for large scale programming tasks.
That's why I'm still using APL.

But APL also supports such interaction, and the ability to interact
with the language has not appeared to me as a problem.  Maybe not
incredibly useful in an operating program, but it's great for
debugging.

Also note that modern APL supports calling routines in Fortran, and
being called from Fortran, and you can substitute arbitrary languages
for Fortran.  So apparently there is some sort of demand for these
kind of features.  I don't have the slightest idea if this is useful
for you, but it seems closer to the sort of thing you're interested
in.

Me, I'm more interested in bringing J up to speed.

   |> Note that if you use access "functions" (verbs) for your global
   |> variables you get similar properties.

   How do you denote simple variables as functions without paying a
   severe run-time penalty?

[a] make sure that the variable refers to a lot of data -- that way
   function call overhead becomes insignificant.

[b] get a compiler working that strips out the run-time overhead.

-- 
Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell                   <rockwell@socrates.umd.edu>