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From: russur@convex.com (Russ Urquhart)
Subject: Re: Control Stuctures in APL 
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Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 22:46:44 GMT
References: <1993Apr10.045751.26616@csus.edu> <734468246snz@apl.demon.co.uk>
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In <734468246snz@apl.demon.co.uk> bowman@apl.demon.co.uk (Dick Bowman) writes:

>I think David has a valid point here; one of the things that I found out way
>back when I was a Cobol programmer (yes, really) was that if you got the data
>right the code sort of fell into place round it. Not an original discovery.

>But, of course, like all simple theories not all of the facts fit and there
>are indeed applications which would benefit from APL having a more
>sophisticated flow-of-control mechanism. Most of the designs for such
>mechanisms, over the years, have (to my mind) been pretty flawed; but there
>may indeed be hope on the horizon. A paper has been doing the rounds which
>brings a new proposal to us; the reaction I've seen from many readers is that
>they're much more interested at the end of the paper than they were at the
>beginning (and how many papers can you say that about?). I hope that the
>paper will soon see wider distribution; I hope even more that vendors will
>implement these proposals so that we can all experiment with the concepts. No,
>I am NOT the author.

To make a comment that was made earlier .re looping structures and how they
can be cast within APL. I recall back from my college days, and Dr. Howland if
he's out there may want to help me on this :^), but a friend I had stated that
ANY loop could be redesigned and thought of as a vectgor operation. It may
take some doing, and may eventually end up less effiecient than a looping
structure, but he felt that this was the case. I would be curious about
everyones opinion on this? Is there an all encompassing algorithm for this?

Just a thought


Russ
