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From: cs450a03@uc780.umd.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: RE: Functional Programming (Re: Good programmers and
Message-ID: <16APR91.08223865@uc780.umd.edu>
Date: 16 Apr 91 08:22:38 GMT
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Neil Weinstock writes:

>To tie these together (sort of :-/), a bunch of us in his class found
>it amusing that the esteemed Dr. Perlis believed that APL was
>absolutely the most readable language.  Why?  Because programs were
>so absurdly compact that you could almost always see them all at once
>on a page.  Yeeks!

I hope he had something of a sense of balance...  programming for
compactness instead of readability can just as easily destroy all
readability as it can improve readability (witness many programs in
the obfuscated C contest).

Also, APLs have had nasty tendencies (like the editors eating all
redundant whitespace) which do nothing good for readability.

>Anyway, we cut him some slack because he despised Pascal and was therefore
>OK in our books.

>[ Perlis actually could have made the above quote 
[["A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything and the cost of nothing."]]
                                                   to characterize APL
>programmers.  We routinely struggled to find new and bizarre ways of doing
>things in the fewest characters.  This often entailed using things like 6
>dimensional array transforms, and other such monstrosities.  We shuddered at
>the thought of what contortions we were causing the computer with our 30
>characters of code... ]

Maybe he didn't teach you this (or maybe he did), but each of those
functions you were using had well defined costs.  Transposition, for
example, is O(n) where n is the number of elements in the array.

Raul Rockwell