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Subject:      Recent APL mentions
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no. 6323657 filed 17.28.06  tue 16 jun 1992
from rbe@ipsa
to   sgapl@ipsa
cc   uclapl
subj Recent APL mentions

@transferred from ipsa  no. 5250349 filed 17.27.35  tue 16 jun 1992

From SIGPLAN Notices, Vol 27, No. 6, June 1992, p 85
 "Where is the evidence against arrays and pointers?"
  Markku Sakkinen

  "...By coincidence, the most recent issues of the IBM Systems Journal,
   celebratinfg the 25th anniversary of APL, arrived on the same day as
   SIGPLAN Notices. There we can find an attitude to arrays that is
   diametrically opposite to that of Ince, Mills, and Lingers, e.g. in
   McIntyre91 ("Language as an Intellectual Tool: From heiroglyphics to APL").  
   The real problem with arrays in many other languages is that no 

   powerful high-level poerations are available for them: almost all
   manipulations must be done element by element. In APL, by contrast,
   one can treat an array as a whole, and in a very functional (or 
   applicative) way. The example from [Mills&Linger] cited above could
   be solved in APL more simply and elegantly still, without an explicit
   sequenctial scan of the text. Unlike the queue solution, the whole-
   array-oriented APL solution could also be amenable to automatic 
   parallelization. (I am in no way an APL expert or enthusiast, but this
   much looks evident.).."


"The Role of Computer Software in Numerical Analysis Teaching"
John Carroll, SIGNUM Newsletter, Vol 27, No 2, April 1992, p 19:

 "...Other interactive encironments of tangential relationship to CLAM
  {Computational Linear Algebra Machine} include APL (1964-1968), Macsyma
  (1971), Maple (1980), and Mathematica (1988). APL was originally developed
  as a language for expressing mathematical thought and was only later
  implemented as a computer language. Its elegant and concise syntax 
  contributes to its beauty, but that and its large number of intrinsic
  operations make it a somewhat costly language to learn to use. Furthermore,
  APL also lacks the use of sparse data structures and algorithms."

Bob



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