Often the one-liners are impressive but there is a problem in that
sometimes they become incomprehensible-needing several lines of comment
to explain.
However APL (and J) does provide for explicit programs which can call on
other programs as subroutines (i.e verbs that are not primiitve(witness,
in J, mean=+/%# -which is actually tighter and yet as clear as in APL
and a hell of a lot more so than in C, Fortran, etc) if that is the way
one wants to go- often not needed as such--. without having to write
all the overhead stuff. As mentioned by Raul ,
Gilman and Rose is excellent and in dealing with particular primitives
has lots of "foo " programs. A key thing is reading from right to left
and the natural use of arrays. As Henry implies, you end up thinking of
the problem, rather than the programming. overhead. It is also easy to
experiment with ideas to see what works ---Immediately!!
Don Kelly
I went googling for some deeper material on how to think like an APL
programmer. I have read/skimmed through a good set of the material on
http://jsoftware.com/papers/ and have skimmed through many of the
books listed on http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Books.
Are there any specific recommendations, free or for purchase? Or,
perhaps I should spend more time with the list above.
I found this, The APL Idiom List by Perlis and Rugaber, which looks
similar to what I'm looking for:
http://archive.vector.org.uk/resource/yaleidioms.pdf.
The review of this book looks like what I'm after,
http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-APL-programming-Clark-Wiedmann/dp/0884050262,
constructing useful programs and going into more depth.
Or something of the style of The Little Schemer,
http://scottn.us/downloads/The_Little_Schemer.pdf
I searched the forum and had trouble finding a relevant post
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