Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!noao!ncar!gatech!purdue!haven!ni.umd.edu!uc780.umd.edu!cs450a03
From: cs450a03@uc780.umd.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: RE: The powerlessness of Lisp
Message-ID: <25MAR91.22180113@uc780.umd.edu>
Date: 25 Mar 91 22:18:01 GMT
References: <1991Mar21.155528.6068@linus.mitre.org> <16521:Mar2516:10:0791@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Sender: usenet@ni.umd.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: The University of Maryland University College
Lines: 36

Dan Bernstein writes:
>But almost everything that people do with jumps can be expressed with
>if/loop/break---and the exceptions or perceived exceptions have been
>enough to keep an unstructured jump in every popular language.

Or if you want to get real fancy, you can put a case statement in a
while loop.  Wonderful way to spaghetti code.  [Just an aside, not why
I'm posting.]

>Where are the examples? Where are the brilliant rewrites of
>statically typed code into dynamically typed code of a fraction of
>the length?

Well... now that I've admitted that I've heard of APL...  

I remember a presentation by this economics professor, where he was
implementing some nasty partial differential model of some theory.  He
had had this team of FORTRAN writers working on it for something like
6 months, and after generating something on the order of 20-50,000
lines of code they gave up.

First pass at writing it in APL was something like 20 pages of code.
In the presentation he had it down to three, and claimed that he could
see further improvements that would take it down to even less.  (His
estimate was that it would get down to about a page).  He also said
that the FORTRAN team would be able to implement his model, now that
they had something to base their work on.

I don't remember much more than that, this was around 87-88, and at
the time I was more interested in trying to figure out what the
variables in the model stood for than I was in the code.

By the way, please don't try and claim that APL has a better math
library than FORTRAN.  You'll upset a whole bunch of dusty deckers ;-)

Raul Rockwell