On Friday, September 27, 2013 4:13:52 PM UTC+5:30, Dave Angel wrote: > You should study APL. Many functions were written in one line, with > twenty lines of explanation. The function itself was considered > unreadable nonsense. And if a function stopped working, general wisdom > was to throw it out, and re-implement the explanation. I studied it > briefly in class in 1970, and have no idea if there are current > implementations.
>From a certain pov both python and APL have a similar/analogous weakness -- >inadequate 'intermediate' structuring constructs. APL tries to be superman at the expression ie micro level Likewise what packages and modules are to python, workspaces are to APL (not used myself but I know that APLers swear by them) -- call that the macro level The intermediate level is the issue. Functional languages have the let/where clause to convert a block of defs into a single value. Even gcc extends C similarly: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Statement-Exprs.html#Statement-Exprs I do occasionally miss something like that in python -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
