Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!oddjob!ncar!ames!pasteur!ic.Berkeley.EDU!faustus From: faustus@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: What makes a language "easy" to program in? Message-ID: <3880@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> Date: 10 Jun 88 05:14:18 GMT References: <350@piring.cwi.nl> <711@cunixc.columbia.edu> <3799@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <712@cunixc.columbia.edu> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu Distribution: comp Lines: 17 In article <350@piring.cwi.nl>, guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) writes: > Remember that trees are often used as a way to implement other > abstractions: associative arrays, sorted sets with easy insert/ > retrieve/delete operations, etc. It might be more appropriate to > add such "higher-level" data types to a language than pointers. The way you would add such data types to a language is to build them out of the primitives available, which are pointers (in the case of C), or arrays (in the case of APL). Actually adding them as primitives would be a very bad idea -- you could never add enough to make everybody happy. The sorts of things I use pointers for that I couldn't use arrays for are parse trees and graphs (both directed and undirected). Often there is no "higher-level concept" I am trying to express. Has anybody written code to deal with these things in APL? Is it as ugly as it seems? Wayne