The RS/1 statistical system used a table-based approach; it was wonderful! If I ever spend time to design a language, it's going to have "table" as the main no

The RS/1 statistical system used a table-based approach; it was wonderful! If I ever spend time to design a language, it's going to have "table" as the main non-primitive type, with some "hints" to sallow super speed. Cool features: tables could be much larger than memory; they were swapped out as needed. Temporary tables would just stay in memory until memory pressure grew too high; then they were automatically spilled to disk. What in unix are weird-looking files (termcap, I'm looking at you!) were just tables of data. Unlike SQL table, RS/1 simply let you change tables using a nice editor (or via SQL-like commands). Also unlike SQL tables, RS/1 tables should be grouped into objects; an XY graph was simply a collection of tables (a data table, a table for options like line color, some ticks tables, and more). Normally you edit a graph using a nice editor, but you could also edit the (documented) underlying tables. Overall, it was the single most productive programming and data manipulation environment (for it's time) that I've used.