Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
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From: ibe1109@draper.com (Ira Ekhaus)
Subject: Weaning 2; another take
Message-ID: <IBE1109.93Jan19001413@etbsun1.draper.com>
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Organization: Draper Laboratory, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1993 05:14:12 GMT
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hello,

First let me thank those who posted a reply to my first query, you
know who you are!!  This might be more productive as a roundtable with
comp.lang.apl listening in, so I have a few more points:

1) If I accept the performance hit  an interpreter takes in providing
    a powerful language, then the only issue in my mind is:
    Can said interpreter be used as an environment to allocate memory and
    call precompiled subroutines? How are the various dialects of APL and
    especiallly J at this ?
    If this doesn't work 99.98% of the time, it's not a solution.
   and
1a) said interpreter should have some pretty good graphics built in.

2)  What if it turns out that my real priority is interactive graphics,
    not an elegant  language implementation?
    I just posted a question on gnu.misc that goes more or less like:
	"can gnuplot be hooked into gdb (gnu's debugger), so that a user, specifying a pointer,
	the number of  points and  a plot style could produce either an X11 window
	or a postscript file of his(her) data ?"
	
3) And now I'll prove how little I know about everything (and I mean
everything) by asking a real naive question:

	What if J (or some APL) could be implemented as an extension
	to gdb 	or as its own debugger. This would allow for debugging
	pointers as well as algorithms, with all the power of a full
	compiled language available.  BTW, what's the difference
	between a  debugger with lots of operators and and an interpreter?

I'm not a compiler or language type.  I'm just tired of Matlab (or any
"easy language/environment") getting me 90% of the way and leaving me high and
dry. 

Thanks for reading,

Ira
ekhaus@draper.com
Draper Laboratories m.s. 7c
555 Technology Square
Cambridge , MA 
02139
