Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!a.cs.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!liberte
From: liberte@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Subject: APL-like languages
Message-ID: <4600002@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 17 Jul 88 19:41:00 GMT
Lines: 25
Nf-ID: #N:m.cs.uiuc.edu:4600002:000:1058
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!liberte    Jul 17 14:41:00 1988


I've been reading this group for a couple years now and havent noticed
any discussion of APL features in other languages.   So what have
people found?  

I would be interested in learning about APL-like libraries
for object-oriented languages.  The APL syntax and operator
overloading are interesting by themselves.  But the general array
processing capability is what makes APL uniquely special.

Also, the interactive environment speeds debugging.
I learned APL (as my first language) 15 years ago and since then
have only seen a couple languages with similar interactive
capability.  I dabbled in Forth partly for its interactive
environment.  Most interpreted language environments provide this,
but compiled implementations could too.  Lightspeed Pascal for the
Macintosh allows arbitrary expression evaluation while debugging.

I guess I was spoiled by APL in some ways.  I expected the good
features of APL to be found in more programming languages/environments.

Dan LaLiberte
uiucdcs!liberte
liberte@cs.uiuc.edu
liberte%a.cs.uiuc.edu@uiucvmd.bitnet