Re: APL & Programming Concepts

Randy MacDonald wrote:
> <snip>
 >
> No APL vendor is going to know all the needed primitives in advance, 
> so that expectation is kind of excessive.

nobody asked the APL vendors to know all the needed primitives in advance

the suggestion was that some people might like to define their own types 
-- i.e, user-defined types, as opposed to primitive types -- which 
relieves the APL vendors of the aforementioned expectation

> For me 'new' and 'to' are all the tools I seem to need for OO, typing, 
> whatever it is called this week.

that's fine for you, but doesn't seem to satisfy the guys who are 
looking for complex arithmetic

interesting that you should equate OO and typing  --  I would agree 
100%: rationals and spreadsheets occupy different ends of the spectrum, 
maybe, but they certainly lie on the same spectrum

quite why the two topics have developed their own vocabularies is 
something of a mystery to me (but then, so are many other things)

/phil