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Thanks. My APL2 used to be littered with a lot of "eaches" which generated a lot of complaints in code review (raised, "sideways colon"), but seemed a natural

by gtani 10y ago

Thanks. My APL2 used to be littered with a lot of "eaches" which generated a lot of complaints in code review (raised, "sideways colon"), but seemed a natural way to express things. Is this a divergence between APL2 and Sharp implementation? I used to work (a long time ago) with a lot of ex-Sharp people from Toronto who were always harping about the superiority of Sharp.

lokedhs 10y ago
I'm not sure. I don't actually know that much amount APL history. I've really only used it for a few years. If you want a lot more information about that, I recommend you join the GNU APL mailing list, as some of the members there know a lot about the history: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-apl https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-apl As far as I know, Sharp APL was "old style" in the sense that it did not support nested arrays. Some people may like that style, but I have a hard time seeing that it is "better", since the nesed arrays are backward compatible with the non-nested style. Note that you can also use the ⊂ and ⊃ functions to convert between nested and recursive arrays. For example, assuming you have an array of strings: a ← 'here' 'are' 'some' 'strings' ⍝ a is now a single-dimensional array of 4 elements ⍴a 4 ⍝ The ⊃ function converts the nested array into a two-dimensional array ⊃a here are some strings ⍝ The array is two-dimensional with 4 rows and 7 columns ⍴ ⊃a 4 7