On Nov 22, 2012, at 10:12 AM, lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote: >> I remembering finding Iverson's book "A Programming Language" quite >> interesting. > > I don't remember the book any more, but I did read the library copy in > its entirety, maybe even more than once and was thrilled when the > university almost accidentally got an APL interpreter from Univac for > their 1106. It got me into real trouble with the cycle counters, it > was expensive to run and interactive time was even more expensive.
At school I had a part time job with a cancer epidemiology group (associated with the same school). I used up so much of their "funny money" at the school computer center (all IBM computers with expensive compute time) by using APL, I had to drop back to using PL/I for them! The thing is, you make far fewer mistakes in APL but they can cause a lot more damage! I wonder if the financial "quants" made such mistakes in 2008 :-) > Today it is just a topic for nostalgic conversation, but it really > made a difference to me, it was as if a switch had been thrown in my > head. Iverson's papers are still very useful when programming in APL2 or languages like k, j or q.
