Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Path: watmath!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!torn!nott!uotcsi2!news
From: cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne)
Subject: Re: APL Discussion
Message-ID: <1993Apr8.152512.23182@csi.uottawa.ca>
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Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, University of Ottawa
References: <C55qFJ.Ayp@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 93 15:25:12 GMT

In article <C55qFJ.Ayp@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca> "David Liebtag" <LIEBTAG@STLVM20.VNET.IBM.COM> writes:
>Pedro,
>
>Please do go ahead and ask those questions.  We get those all the time
>on our groups and there are lots of people who really enjoy answering
>that kind of question.
>
>More reasons why there's less talk about APL than J:
>
>  The character set.  Obviously.

It certainly is somewhat more difficult to communicate answers around
when APL doesn't use ASCII.

On the other hand, the thing that has been disturbing/discouraging me
quite a bit is that every time I look around, there seems to be Yet
Another Idiom that's a "better way" of computing things.  Much the
thing that Pedro talks about.

There's an obscure book out there called something like the "Finnish
APL Society List of APL Idioms;" a brief monograph containing probably
hundreds of APL one-liners to do a wide variety of small tasks.  This
is the sort of thing that would be really useful for people; I'd
really like to see ISI release a book entitled "How to Do it in J: A
Whole Pile of Idioms."  It would allow people to do much less
recreating of wheels.

Emmett's series of postings on things like Lagrange interpolation,
selective amending, and the likes seems pretty useful.

It would be kind of nice to see similar postings in APL, although
obviously more difficult due to the character set and proliferations
of versions.

If people figure that J has "taken over" comp.lang.apl, and they're
unhappy about it, they're quite free to actually post information on
APL, improving (from their perspective) the Signal/Noise ratio.
That's what Usenet is there for :-).
-- 
Christopher Browne                |     PGP 2.0 key available
cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca           |======================================
University of Ottawa              | Genius may have its limitations, but
Master of System Science Program  | stupidity is not thus handicapped.
