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Path: utzoo!watmath!looking!syncro
From: syncro@looking.UUCP (Tom Haapanen)
Newsgroups: net.lang.apl
Subject: Re: APL structure
Message-ID: <574@looking.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Jun-86 09:59:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: looking.574
Posted: Tue Jun 10 09:59:49 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Jun-86 22:18:01 EDT
References: <798@wcwvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: syncro@looking.UUCP (Tom Haapanen)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 34

In article <798@wcwvax.UUCP> ian@wcwvax.UUCP (Ian Kemmish) writes:

>When APL was all I knew, I used to think it had data structures, and that
>nested arrays, when they eventually arrived, would be even better.
> ...
>Now I earn my bread & butter playing around in C, I *know* that APL
>doesn't have structured data!  I don't think I could possibly go back
>now.
>
>What I want to know is, am I a lone voice crying in the wilderness,
>or do other people who've moved on from APL feel the same way??

When APL was all *I* knew (actually APL and FORTRAN), I thought that the
arrays were quite sufficient for keeping data around.  You'd have a bunch
of arrays for keeping all the information about a set of items.  Arrays of
records?  What?  Linked lists?  Who?

And yet, after having been converted to C (and to Pascal and WSL), I spent
last summer programming a large project in APL.  Oh, I missed the data
structures, but you can manage without them.  It's very easy to insert
elements into the middle of an array dynamically, and nested arrays allow
you to keep different types of data objects in one array.  Alas, you can't
refer to elements by name, although using 'constants' to do indexing is
possible.

I felt a bit crippled going back to APL, but, then, there was that feeling
of power, being able to manipulate matrices with a single keystroke!

--
\tom haapanen					looking glass software ltd.
syncro@looking.UUCP				waterloo, ontario, canada
watmath!looking!syncro				(519) 884-7473

"These opinions are solely mine, although even I would like to deny them..."