Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language
To   : comp.programming
From : Arthur J. O'Dwyer
Date : Wed Aug 03 2005 02:28 pm


On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, CBFalconer wrote:
>
> "Arthur J. O'Dwyer" wrote:
>> OTOH, I remember that APL has one of the most "mutable" syntaxes in
>> the world, with the possible exception of Lisp (or so I've heard).
>> The APL manual I was reading finished up with an implementation of
>> a line-based text editor using code like
>>
>>      IF LINE NOT EMPTY THEN ADD 1 TO LINECOUNT
>
> I think you are confusing COBOL and APL.

Nope. But you're forgiven for thinking so. :)  Let's see... in the above 
snippet, I think it would make the most sense to define

   EMPTY a constant
   LINE a variable and NOT a binary operator, or else
   LINE a unary function and NOT a unary function
   IF might as well be a no-op, I guess
   and so on.

For a similar simulation of advanced control structures in APL, see
"Adding a modern control structure to APL without changing the syntax,"
http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm/id=803676&type=pdf
It was the first relevant thing I found in a Google search. It's not quite 
as syntactically clean, though, possibly because it's using a dialect of 
APL with fewer or messier built-in magic things.

-Arthur

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