Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!philip
From: philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough)
Subject: Re: How to Choose a Programming Language
Message-ID: <1991May11.230407.1038@utstat.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Statistics
References: <14309@ucrmath.ucr.edu> <1991May9.231820.26867@utstat.uucp> <16117@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: Sat, 11 May 1991 23:04:07 GMT

In article <16117@smoke.brl.mil> gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>In article <1991May9.231820.26867@utstat.uucp> philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) writes:
>>So the issue of not being able to deal with symbols is very distressing.
>>It has forced some of the APL community to adopt an ASCII character set, ...

>It had nothing to do with the ability of PEOPLE to deal with symbols,
>but rather with the unavailability of Iverson's funny symbols in most
>computer character code sets.

The "funny symbols" have been available for virtually every computer for a
long time. The main complaint was not the unavailability( since there were
even ascii equivalents before Iverson came out with J) but the so-called
unreadability of APL code, and the difficulty people had in maintaining
other people's programs. This difficulty can be traced to most programmers'
poor grasp of the concepts of mathematics and their inability to think in
abstract ways.
 
Philip McDunnough
University of Toronto
philip@utstat.utoronto.ca
[my opinions,...]