Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!henry.jpl.nasa.gov!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!zardoz!dhw68k!felix!arcturus!evil
From: evil@arcturus.UUCP (Wade Guthrie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Right-to-left (was: Re: entry at other than main)
Message-ID: <5831@arcturus>
Date: 28 Aug 89 16:02:20 GMT
References: <19173@mimsy.UUCP> <207600032@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <19218@mimsy.UUCP> <10731@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> <230@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl> <1989Aug26.221107.25606@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: Rockwell International, Anaheim, CA
Lines: 32

henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <230@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl> dolf@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (Dolf Grunbauer) writes:
>>For those unknown to APL: do you know that APL is so compact that an
>>algorithm to get the first N primes can be written in just *ONE* expression
>>(of about 25 characters), including the reading of N from the terminal ?

>Yes, and a month afterward, even its author can't understand it without
>half an hour of study.

Well, this is not entirely true.  My second language was APL; the thing that I 
learned above all else was documentation.  When one works with, and learns to think in,
a language that is inherently unreadable even to the least casual observer (:->),
he tends (in some, rare, instances) to compensate by documenting the poo out of the 
code and striving for ways to express himself clearly.  Yes, even APL can be made to 
be readable, although I would not call it an altogether pleseant or trivial exercise.  
I think that learning APL at such an early (and impressionable) stage in my 
programming career was an extremely valuable prelude to programming in C; consider
expressions like:

	blah = *((char * (*)())snarf(*stuff));

(it's been a while, the syntax probably stinks, but you get the idea. . .)


Wade Guthrie
evil@arcturus.UUCP
Rockwell International
Anaheim, CA

(Rockwell doesn't necessarily believe / stand by what I'm saying; how could
they when *I* don't even know what I'm talking about???)