On Thu, 6 May 2021 at 16:13, Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > I suppose APL might come closest, but it's hardly mainstream. > > No reason why it couldn't be. It's the same age as C, so why not? :-) I think because for lesser minds, such as mine, it's line noise. A friend of mine, a Perl guru, studied A-Plus for a while. (Morgan Stanley's in-house APL dialect.) He said to me that "when I came back to Perl, I found it irritatingly verbose..." and then was immediately deeply shocked at the thought. I seriously think this is why Lisp didn't go mainstream. For a certain type of human mind, it's wonderful and clear and expressive, but for most of us, it's just a step too far. Ditto Forth, ditto Postscript, etc. Plain old algebraic infix notation has thrived for half a millennium because it's easily assimilated and comprehended, and many arguably better notations just are not. The importance of being easy, as opposed to being clear, or unambiguous, or expressive, etc., is widely underestimated. > My favorite "radically different" processing concept is by Martin Rem, in his > thesis "Associons and the closure statement" from 1976 > (http://alexandria.tue.nl/extra1/PRF2B/7606837.pdf). I'd love to see that > implemented. He certainly gave no clue on how that could be done, and I > haven't reached any clue either. > > Then there's Pinatubo (2016: > https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~jzhao/files/Pinatubo-dac2016.pdf) which seems > related to William Shooman's "orthogonal computer (from 1961; it was sold by > Sanders Associates for a while). Ooh, great. Thank you, I will read up on these. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
