🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16781@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes:
> I'm curious as to whether the use of
> Fortran rather than APL is a matter of tradition (together with the
> fact that until recently APL has used a special character set - this, of
> course, wouldn't have been terribly difficult to change if there had
> been sufficient interest), or whether numerical programmers have
> seriously considered it and rejected it.

APL is unreadable. The character set isn't a problem for writing code
(DM terminals are common enough), but it's a problem for reading code.
APL has abominations like ``a**b'' to represent ``a to the bth power''.
Uh, wait a minute, maybe not that one, but you get the idea.

:-)

Seriously, APL has the same problem as Ada: it's too big. By the time
you learn how to multiply matrices in APL, you can write a complete
matrix-manipulation package in Fortran or any other language. The
plethora of unusual notations in APL is just a symptom of this problem.

---Dan