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From: FC01@USC-ECL@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Language Translation
Message-ID: <4452@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 20-Aug-83 15:26:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.4452
Posted: Sat Aug 20 15:26:00 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Aug-83 01:24:51 EDT
Lines: 36

I like the APL person's [Shrager's] point of view on translation.
The problem seems to be that APL has all the things it needs in its
primative functions. Lisp implementers have seen fit to impurify
their language by adding so much fancy stuff that they depend on so
heavily.  If every lisp program were translated into lisp 1.5 (or
so), it would be easy to port things, but it would end in
innefficient implementations.  I like APL, in fact, I like it so much
I've begun maintaining it on our unix system. I've fixed several
bugs, and it now seems to work very well.  It has everything any
other APL has, but nobody seems to want to use it except me. I write
simulators in a day, adaptive networks in a week, and analyze
matrices in seconds. So at any rate, anyone who is interested in APL
on the VAX - especially for machine intelligence applications please
get in touch with me. It's not ludicrous by the way, IBM does more
internal R+D in APL than in any other language! That includes their
robotics programs where they do lots of ARM solutions (matrix
manipulation being built into APL has tremendous advantages in this
domain).

FLAME ON!
[I believe this refers the Stan the Leprechaun's submission in
V1 #43. -- KIL]

So if your language translation program is the last word in
translators, how come it's not in the journals? How come nobody knows 
that it solves all the problems of translation? How come you haven't
made a lot of money selling COBOL to PASCAL to C to APL to LISP to
ASSEMBLER to BASIC to ... translators in the open market? Is it that
it only works for limited cases? Is it that it only deals with
'natural' languages? Is it really as good as you think, or do you only
think it's really good?  How about sharing your (hopefully non
NPcomplete) solution to an NP complete problem with the rest of us!  
FLAME OFF!

[...]
                Fred