Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!otter!hjb
From: hjb@otter.hpl.hp.com (Harry Barman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: APL one-liners
Message-ID: <2400027@otter.hpl.hp.com>
Date: 30 Aug 89 09:52:41 GMT
References: <1Sb3wq#7YODnT=eric@snark.uu.net>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 15

As long as you make use of array operations, the performance of APL isn't too
bad.  The killer is when you get programs that look like fortran, and try to
step through each element "by hand".

My father is used to work for an APL software house, and has written APL 
programs that substantially outperform the original COBOL (the APL was
reasonably structured as well!).

Like many other languages, people can write very messy and cryptic programs
in APL.  APL does have its uses as a rapid development/prototyping language
for applications that require reasonably complex calculations.

Cheers,

Harry