Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!hsdndev!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd
From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Languages for numerical programming (was Fortran etc.)
Message-ID: <1158:Dec923:58:0490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 9 Dec 90 23:58:04 GMT
References: <8960031@hpfcso.HP.COM> <1990Dec7.174243.29683@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <16781@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: IR
Lines: 21

In article <16781@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes:
> I'm curious as to whether the use of
> Fortran rather than APL is a matter of tradition (together with the
> fact that until recently APL has used a special character set - this, of
> course, wouldn't have been terribly difficult to change if there had
> been sufficient interest), or whether numerical programmers have
> seriously considered it and rejected it.

APL is unreadable. The character set isn't a problem for writing code
(DM terminals are common enough), but it's a problem for reading code.
APL has abominations like ``a**b'' to represent ``a to the bth power''.
Uh, wait a minute, maybe not that one, but you get the idea.

:-)

Seriously, APL has the same problem as Ada: it's too big. By the time
you learn how to multiply matrices in APL, you can write a complete
matrix-manipulation package in Fortran or any other language. The
plethora of unusual notations in APL is just a symptom of this problem.

---Dan