Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Path: watmath!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!caen!uunet!mcsun!sunic!news.lth.se!kurt
From: kurt@dna.lth.se (Kurt Swanson)
Subject: J is NOT APL (was Re: Interpreter advice sought.)
Message-ID: <1993Jan23.100553.21973@lth.se>
Sender: news@lth.se
Organization: Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden
References: <1993Jan21.160604.7887@lth.se>
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 10:05:53 GMT
Lines: 23

kurt@dna.lth.se (Kurt Swanson)  [That's me] writes:
>Is there any "free" apl *interpreter* available for UNIX and/or MAC's???
                     ===

Many have written to me tell me about the wonders of J.  Thanks, but
I'm not interested.  I've used it. It's not APL.

To me the "enhancements" of J from APL are minimal, and certainly not
enough to swallow that terrible ASCIIzation of the language (even if
you can say J is a modification of APL).

In these days of fonts galore, graphical windows (of many types),
postscript, and last but not least UNICODE, there is NO reason to
switch to an antiquated 7-bit US standard.

From a pure programming theory standpoint, J is flawed where APL is
not.  APL uses real mathematical symbols that, (get this), perform
what they look like they should.  J uses cryptic combinations of
overloaded operators taken from a subset of english punctuation.  Talk
about unreadability!!!
-- 
Kurt Swanson, Dept. of Computer Science,
Lunds universitet.  Kurt.Swanson@dna.lth.se
