Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Path: watmath!watserv1!torn!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!haven.umd.edu!socrates!socrates!rockwell
From: rockwell@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell)
Subject: Re: SIGNUM of teaching numerical methods
In-Reply-To: andrew@rentec.com's message of 19 Jul 92 00:07:22 GMT
Message-ID: <ROCKWELL.92Jul19155653@socrates.umd.edu>
Sender: rockwell@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell)
Organization: Traveller
References: <1992Jul15.093105.22737@math.waterloo.edu> <1072@kepler1.rentec.com>
	<1992Jul17.171448.13672@chpc.utexas.edu> <1079@kepler1.rentec.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1992 20:56:53 GMT
Lines: 33

Jonathan Thornburg:
   >Alas, I have to agree with Andrew. 

Andrew Mullhaupt:
   Small consolation, given what APL/J might have been...

"might have been..."?  Huh?

If you were saying "could be", then I think I'd see your point.  But
if you're saying about how history should be different...  I guess I
just don't get it.

   Oh by the way - I should point out that Splus isn't perfect either
   - it has the stupidest function calling ever implemented in an
   interpreter - it _copies_ every argument so that functions can't
   modify their arguments, _no matter how large they are_. 

This does allow fast implementation of the language.  Not knowing
Splus, and not being interested in working on it's implementation, let
me just say that it sounds more like you wish that there were more
implementation work than it sounds like you're criticizing the
language design.

   I still stand by my original point, which is, there is _no_
   language which really answers all the needs of scientific
   computing.

Hmm.. I'd say that that all languages put together don't really answer
all the needs of scientific computing.  But the reasons have more to
do with implementation limits than linguistics.

-- 
Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell                   <rockwell@socrates.umd.edu>
