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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!cornell!gjohnson
From: gjohnson@cornell.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.apl
Subject: add functions to the list of scalar types?
Message-ID: <7902@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Apr-84 21:51:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.7902
Posted: Mon Apr 30 21:51:38 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 1-May-84 19:35:25 EDT
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept.
Lines: 22

Has anyone proposed allowing functions to be viewed as data items in APL?
What I have in mind is the ability to construct arrays of functions.
One could then have a dyadic operation 'apply' which takes an array of
functions as one argument and an array of arguments as the other argument
and applies each function to the corresponding element of the argument
array.
Or perhaps one might want to add an application operator to the language.
Then one could have arrays of dyadic functions.
We could then do something like this:

   funcs := + - ^
   arg1 := 3 4 1
   arg2 := 7 1 1
   arg1 funcs <apply operator> arg2
10 3 1

It might be interesting to extend the scalar types to include functions
(in addition to numbers and characters), add an application function
to the set of APL primitives, and devise whatever operators seem appropriate.

			- Greg Johnson
			  ...!cornell!gjohnson