I took Thomas’s “loony-land” comment as jest.
Presumably we all study the Turing Award lectures, each being the computer science community’s way of passing a life’s celebrated contributions to the future. In Dr. Iverson’s Turing Award lecture, “Notation as a Tool of Thought,” he explores the link between expression of ideas and the power to create and advance ideas. Essentially, that “language shapes thought,” one of the beliefs I hold. His use of minus and negative there are not the only “loony” (perhaps meaning “other than ordinary”) ideas in what remains to this day an intellectual treasure. I have Iverson’s high-school textbook which uses the notation. You see the notation it as APL, but in fact it was created as a way to describe a computer architecture (the IBM 360 then in development) in a formalism that allowed proofs of operation and implementation. I studied those books too. It is not so uncommon that an at first bewildering notation can come to feel a comfortable home. This is true of music, mathematics, emacs, and much more. Rob Pike’s Ivy is APL themed if you want to explore that. The latest descendent of APL is “J,” itself a descendent of “Dictionary APL” which was Iverson’s effort to use ordinary notation to lower the initial threshold for new programmers. Michael From: Lucio <lucio.d...@gmail.com> Date: Friday, August 19, 2016 at 10:23 PM To: golang-nuts <golang-nuts@googlegroups.com> Cc: Michael Jones <michael.jo...@gmail.com>, <axel.wagner...@googlemail.com>, <rthornton...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [go-nuts] Unary + On Saturday, 20 August 2016 02:29:17 UTC+2, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: With all due respected to the illustrious Dr. Iverson, he was in loony-land with his two versions of minus. I take exception to the "loony-land" qualification of Dr Iverson's raised minus. I think it was immensely appropriate and sadly forgotten that APL introduced the brilliant idea of discarding operator precedence in favour of making functions themselves operators with NO associated precedence. The use of a raised minus to eliminate confusion was a sensible one, one Michael Jones further justifies in its use in teaching Algebra (I still smart when I remember my confusion in Algebra classes after the teacher dropped all minus and plus signs and the parentheses she'd used until then!). Even sadder, I find the disappearance of RPN from hand-held calculators, for which I hold HP almost entirely responsible. That APL is still available in some form or other I find emotionally,but sadly not economically, rewarding. My short liaison with the language has given me a perspective I still believe helped shape all of my computing experience since those late 1970 years. Lucio. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
