View Source: APL - Waikato Linux Users Group

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An [Acronym] for __A__ ProgrammingLanguage.

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.

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''

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Part of CategoryProgrammingLanguages

One page links to APL:

KnowYourSysadmin

Last edited on Sunday, January 2, 2005 11:07:09 am by AristotlePagaltzis

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