Dan Lingman wrote:
"mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote in news:1149428711.900916.89960 @g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:I hope that eventually we'll be dealing with very high abstraction levels, perhaps languages with its own symbology rather than being forced into being expressed in roman character sets, etc. There is a long, long way to go before such ideals are realised though. Fortunately, some people are beginning to see the light. MattPining for APL are we? :-)
Ah--brevity of expression carried to its limit--often described as a "write-only language". ;-) It is interesting to think of APL as a subject for some advanced (dynamic) optimization. It was conceived as a fully interpreted language, encouraging the use of vector and matrix ops that could produce truly huge intermediate data structures, just to eventually boil them down to a scalar. Later implementations introduced optimizations that attempted to create some of the larger data structures "lazily" to save space and time, while leaving the pure algebra of the source APL intact. The "near applicative" nature of APLs semantics was quite well suited to parallel evaluation. I wonder what modern optimization techniques and multiprocessor platforms could do with it today--perhaps with some semantic tweaks to clean things up. Then there's always that amazing keyboard... ;-) -michael Parallel computing for 8-bit Apple II's! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it is seriously underused."