aleph0 wrote:
> I've trained many people in APL and had many surprises.
> If I had to generalise, I'd have to say that those that CAN see the
> wood for the trees are generally good at APL; i.e. solution oriented.
>
> As a result, many business professionals take to APL like a duck to
> water ; because they "see" the solution rather than a problem ;-)
>
> I've had a researcher that proudly send me his "Aids Research" - done
> mainly using APL. An ****p-Building Engineer that used to use Fortran
> took up APL and never looked back.
>
> OTOH, one particular assembler programmer never managed to write a
> single line of APL code properly within 1 year , whereas another
> assembler programmer loved APL.
>
> In fact. I actually heard about APL pre 1970 from a swedish IBM friend
> of mine who was enthusing about it. He used it to create a Macro
> Assembler for the 370 mainframe OS at the time ( VS 2.2 ) in south
> England.
>
> I see APL as a sort of high level assembler language.
> As in Assembler, you have bascially complete freedom to so what you
> want in memory .. same goes for APL!
>
> FWIW
At one time I taught a course in BASIC. The best solutions of the last
assignment of the term took the better students two pages. I did it in
one line short of one page and, just for kicks put an APL solution on
that last line. It was a short line and had a comment on the end of it.
re comments: Even now that I'm retired and only programming for my own
use, I always comment my code - not with "how it works", that's obvious
from the code, but with "what it does" stated in a few words. I am
still using some APL code I wrote in 1967 updated to take advantage of
APL2 and large memory.
Ted
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