4 ms·
APL family of languages is next? I have been seriously looking into a good APL (or deciding between A+ / J / etc.) for use in scripting. Right now I think AWK
by patrickg_zill 8y ago
APL family of languages is next?
I have been seriously looking into a good APL (or deciding between A+ / J / etc.) for use in scripting. Right now I think AWK to massage the data and ${APL choice} to analyze it might be the right way to go.
- sdegutis 8y agoAPL seems to require buying another keyboard just to edit it. Maybe an IDE can help me type SD←((+/((X - AV←(T←+/X)÷⍴X)2))÷⍴X)0.5 but I'm not really sure I want it to. AWK is highly specialized to interpret ad hoc data structures encoded in strings and spit out new similarly ad hoc strings, like all other unix utils. Personally I hope that's not the future. In fact I wish for the day our terminals and coreutils are replaced with utilities that speak JSON or something.
- Jtsummers 8y agoDyalog and the emacs APL mode both let you use a prefix key for the special characters. By default it's either . or `. So .. gives you a period, and .r gives you rho. It's not so bad if you practice with it for a bit each day for a couple weeks. I became reasonably proficient after about a month of 30 minutes a day of APL practice earlier this year. It would be harder if you don't touch type yet (I suspect).
- patrickg_zill 8y agoSome APLs do require non ASCII key usage, but you can use a regular keyboard with Shift, Alt, etc. J uses all regular ASCII characters however ; as does K and Q.