You're saying that brevity for typing on 110 baud teletypes was the primary reason for the density of APL operators, but that's not historically true. For one t

You're saying that brevity for typing on 110 baud teletypes was the primary reason for the density of APL operators, but that's not historically true. For one thing Iverson and pretty much everyone else high profile in the APL community has said that the conciseness was itself a major part of the power of APL. Further proof of that: APL began as a mathematical notation on chalkboards, and only later was it decided to implement as a programming language. As an aside, Unix also began in the era of 110 baud teletypes, which motivated brevity of many of its common commands (ls, cat, etc), and those brief names have been criticized a lot -- but people still use Unix/Linux; the brevity is a side issue, not a deciding point. As usual with most things.