Differences between version 2 and previous revision of APL.
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| Newer page: | version 2 | Last edited on Sunday, January 2, 2005 11:07:09 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 1 | Last edited on Saturday, January 1, 2005 1:05:44 pm | by StephanZielinski | Revert |
@@ -1,14 +1,10 @@
-APL:
Acronym for "
A Programming Language
."
+An [
Acronym]
for __
A__ ProgrammingLanguage
.
-Kenneth E. Iverson developed Iverson notation in the late 1950s, joined IBM
-
APL
-
+Kenneth E. Iverson developed Iverson notation in the late 1950s, joined [
IBM]
in the early 1960s, and then developed [
APL]
from Iverson notation. [
APL]
is notable in that it uses a tremendous (and non-[
ASCII]
) character set. [APL] is traditionally considered succinct to the point of impenetrability. It is sometimes described as a "write-only language" — it takes a tremendous amount of effort to look at a line of [APL] code and figure out what it does, let alone what it was meant to do
.
-APL is traditionally considered succinct to the point of impenetrability.
-
---
functions
-
--- most modern
coders avoid them since they tend
to lead to
-unmaintainable
code. (APL is sometimes described as a "write
-only language"
--
-it takes a tremendous amount
of effort to look at a line of APL code and
-figure out what it's meant to do, let alone what it actually does.)
+While some modern languages such as the various [
LISP]
dialects allow the same sort of peculiarities that led to [
APL]
's extreme terseness —
functions taking other functions as parameters only to return an array of functions, for example —
coders are often advised to
avoid them in favour of maintainable code.
+
+''That particular example probably applies mostly
to [Java] wussies who work as 9-5 code grunts. Functional programming is an underappreciated metaphor that can
lead to concise, very flexible *and* maintainable
code. See [ML] f.ex. —AristotlePagaltzis''
+
+-
---
+Part
of CategoryProgrammingLanguages
