🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16781@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
writes:
>If you numerical programming folk like Fortran because of its
>facilities for handling multi-dimensional arrays and builtin complex
>numbers, how come you don't use APL? APL has been around a good long time,
>exists for quite a few machines, and makes Fortran's mathematical
>facilities look like a joke. 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. What say you?

     I'll admit that it's been a long time since I've played with APL and
that even when I had a chance to do so, I didn't really get into it.
The impression that I was left with however is that APL is better suited
as a sort of "desk calculator" language (for testing ideas) than as a
production language.  Has this changed?  I don't remember for instance
that APL had much in the way of control structures.  (Yes, yes, I know
that Fortran isn't terribly impressive in this respect either.)  I also
remember that it was very easy to write short programs in APL that made
lots of sense as you were typing them in, but that five minutes later it
was just about impossible to make any sense of what you'd done.  (I
think that the funny character set was as much of a problem as anything
else here.)  Finally, the APL I used was interpreted.  Are there APL
compilers?  What's the state of the art in APL?

				Marc R. Roussel
                                mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca