🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <56569@nigel.ee.udel.edu> new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes:
>
>>Hardly true of Scheme/Lisp.  The only language that might be truly
>>said to possess this characteristic is APL, and only because of its
>>infernal character set.  (Because of this, APL is the one language
>>I've encountered in my life that I've never _wanted_ to master.)
>>Substituting each APL operator with a descriptive name would certainly
>>go a long way towards making it less of a "write-only" language.

Easily done: A number of workers in APL design have come up with a new
dialect of APL known as J. J has the following characteristics:

a. Use of ASCII, rather than APL symbols, thereby ending the tyranny of
   the keyboard/printer.

b. Simplified syntax and semantics -- a lot of the old rough edges which
   crept into APL have been removed, such as funnies with square brackets.

c. First-classness of objects.   

d. New versions of J include control structures for DO UNTIL, CASE, 
   Recursion, as well as generalized reductions. This will appear in
   "Gerunds and Representations", in press - ACM SIGAPL APL91 proceedings,
    R. Hui and R. Bernecky. 

e. ABility to call J from C and vice versa.

Articles on J appear in APL90 (Hui, Iverson, et al), recent issues of 
SIGAPL Quote Quad, Vector(British APL Society), and in an article
which appeared in SIGPLAN Notices Feb 1991: "Fortran 90 Arrays", by
yrs trly.

J is available as shareware through a number of bulletin boards (watserv1 
is one of them), and from Iverson Software Inc, 33 Major St. Toronto.

($24 for the pc version. Not sure about other versions).

Regarding Character Set Theology: See my article in SIGAPL Quote Quad,
Septmber 1990: "Quad av considered Harmful -- still".

ps: These articles all have the WRRONG email address for me, due to 
my inability to type. See below for the correct one(s). the rbe@yrloc...
is preferred.




Robert Bernecky      rbe@yrloc.ipsa.reuter.com  bernecky@itrchq.itrc.on.ca 
Snake Island Research Inc  (416) 368-6944   FAX: (416) 360-4694 
18 Fifth Street, Ward's Island
Toronto, Ontario M5J 2B9 
Canada