Re: APL structure

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2 total messages Started by Ian Kemmish Tue, 03 Jun 1986 10:49

#212

Author: Ian Kemmish
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 1986 10:49

33 lines
1904 bytes

>. . ..  "if/then/else" would be very useful in APL.  You wind up
>using go to (->) instead.  This is bad for the same reason it is bad in
>other languages.  The data structuring somewhat reduces the need for such
                       ^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^
>things, but not all that much -- particularly for complex applications.

When APL was all I knew, I used to think it had data structures, and that
nested arrays, when they eventually arrived, would be even better.

Then I started playing with Lisp and Smalltalk, and I began to get
suspicious.  I started calling what APL had "data aggregates".

Now I earn my bread & butter playing around in C, I *know* that APL
doesn't have structured data!  I don't think I could possibly go back
now.

What I want to know is, am I a lone voice crying in the wilderness,
or do other people who've moved on from APL feel the same way??


Disclaimer: I'm not out of touch: I have APL on my PC at home, but
	I only ever use it for the screen editor;  I have just helped
	port a groovy modern APL onto our MG-1 workstation product,
	and I only ever use *that* when the pop-up calculator runs out
	of steam.

			Ian Kemmish
	  ____
      \   \   \   \    /	Whitechapel Computer Works Ltd.
       \  /\   \  /\  /   	75 Whitechapel Road
        \/  \___\/  \/  	London E1 1DU

"Makers of the fastest (and slowest) workstations in Britain"

Re: APL structure

#214

Author: Tom Haapanen
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1986 13:59

34 lines
2177 bytes

In article <798@wcwvax.UUCP> ian@wcwvax.UUCP (Ian Kemmish) writes:

>When APL was all I knew, I used to think it had data structures, and that
>nested arrays, when they eventually arrived, would be even better.
> ...
>Now I earn my bread & butter playing around in C, I *know* that APL
>doesn't have structured data!  I don't think I could possibly go back
>now.
>
>What I want to know is, am I a lone voice crying in the wilderness,
>or do other people who've moved on from APL feel the same way??

When APL was all *I* knew (actually APL and FORTRAN), I thought that the
arrays were quite sufficient for keeping data around.  You'd have a bunch
of arrays for keeping all the information about a set of items.  Arrays of
records?  What?  Linked lists?  Who?

And yet, after having been converted to C (and to Pascal and WSL), I spent
last summer programming a large project in APL.  Oh, I missed the data
structures, but you can manage without them.  It's very easy to insert
elements into the middle of an array dynamically, and nested arrays allow
you to keep different types of data objects in one array.  Alas, you can't
refer to elements by name, although using 'constants' to do indexing is
possible.

I felt a bit crippled going back to APL, but, then, there was that feeling
of power, being able to manipulate matrices with a single keystroke!

--
\tom haapanen					looking glass software ltd.
syncro@looking.UUCP				waterloo, ontario, canada
watmath!looking!syncro				(519) 884-7473

"These opinions are solely mine, although even I would like to deny them..."

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