Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
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From: gurr@newsparc6 (David Gurr 4-6989 MR Sys)
Subject: Re: APL and IDL
Message-ID: <1992Nov17.141936.584@mr.med.ge.com>
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References: <1992Nov13.165845.27166@csi.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 92 14:19:36 GMT
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rockwell@socrates.umd.edu  writes:

"On the other hand, I don't see the advantage in being contentious with
other languages.  Historically, that's been something of a a dead end.

"If there is one single problem that's hurting the APL community today
it's the difficulty in getting APL systems to take advantage of
advancements from other parts of the computing community."

Hear! Hear!  If I have any gripes about APL and J, it is that while
I save time programming in them, I lose the time getting data in
and out of them.  How about the theme for APL94 being "Communicating,
Cooperating, Competing and Coexisting with the Wider World".

If we think that APL is a better mouse trap than IDL et cetera, then
we need to be able to demonstrate the fact by grabbing IDL data sets
and manipulating them with no fuss.

sam@csi.jpl.nasa.gov  goes further and writes:

"some innovations that I wish APL would have -  extremely easy
extensibility (.m files), and relatively easy (or at
least possible) use of external routines (Fortran, C)".

And I agree entirely.  While shared variables can be used for
this, compare the straight forward use of arrays in APL and
the drudgery of getting a shared variable interface to work.
Compare the difficulty of explaining to a novice reduction
and shared variables.  Not only do I want to process my Excel
spreadsheet files with minimal fuss, I want to use IMSL
functions with minimal fuss.  In previous posts the difficulties
of using Fortran and APL together has been discussed and it
was concluded that using Fortran with APL is very inelegant.
However, compared to using only Fortran, it is very elegant.
I want it to be expedient too.

Unfortunately for me, ISI has forced me to put my programming
where my mouth is (by releasing the source to J).  So I'm trying
to hack some of the above into J.


-David Gurr

