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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!water!ljdickey
From: ljdickey@water.UUCP (Lee Dickey)
Newsgroups: net.lang.apl
Subject: Re: APL structure
Message-ID: <400@water.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-May-86 23:52:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: water.400
Posted: Tue May 27 23:52:20 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 28-May-86 04:12:41 EDT
References: <1477@mmintl.UUCP> <858@bentley.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 20

> >I disagree.  "if/then/else" would be very useful in APL.  You wind up
> >using go to (->) instead.  This is bad for the same reason it is bad in
> >other languages.

But APL already *has* the "if/then/else" in direct definition.  The
beauty of direct definition is that if your off-the-shelf micro APL
does not have it built in, you can easily implement it using Standard
APL.

I think that the power of APL is in the notation, the language itself.

Someone has said that Iverson invented the language as a tool with
which to express algorithms, and that he did not at first expect it to
be implemented as an interpreter.  When some engineers discovered that
the entire 360 architecture could be described in one page of APL code,
they became excited about APL and decided to implement the language as
a development tool.

The name of the first APL was APL\360.  In APL, "\" is the "expand"
function.  APL\360 certainly did expand the 360!