root wrote:
J/APL has advantage of forcing you to think about the solution to
a problem in a completely orthogonal way to the usual programming
paradigms. In my experience the "re-expression" of an idea in a
second, very different form dramatically highlights the design
decisions made in the first form. Since the original authors are
no longer available we need to tease out the design decisions.
Unfortunately I'm unaware of any category or strongly typed work in J
so I don't think the idea carries much weight beyond the numerics. I
added a piecewise Gamma function to Axiom in February and have been
looking at the special functions since then. J seems to be a good fit
in this area, hence the original remark.
Well ... at one time I claimed there were only three "original"
programming languages -- Lisp, APL and Forth. So if we call Axiom a
"dialect of Lisp", recoding pieces of it in an APL dialect would give us
two thirds of the spectrum. Perhaps someone would pick up the third??
But I really think the YAGNI principle needs to be observed here. You
Ain't Gonna Need It! :)
_______________________________________________
Axiom-math mailing list
Axiom-math@nongnu.org
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-math
