First, what is APL?
APL is the first array processing language (that I know of anyway). The following was extracted from http://www.acm.org/sigapl/whyapl.htm. The language was invented by Kenneth E. Iverson while at Harvard University. The language, originally titled “Iverson Notation”, was designed to overcome the inherent ambiguities and points of confusion found when dealing with standard mathematical notation. It was later described in 1962 in a book simply titled “A Programming Language” (hence APL). Towards the end of the sixties, largely through the efforts of IBM, the computer community gained its first exposure to APL. Iverson received the Turing Award in 1980 for this work. APL is a user-oriented notation, particularly well suited for communication from people to other people or to computers. The notation consists of a set of symbols (letters, numbers, punctuation, algebra, and special shapes), with a very simple set of rules (syntax) for putting them together to describe the processing of data.
APL is the first array processing language (that I know of anyway). The following was extracted from http://www.acm.org/sigapl/whyapl.htm. The language was invented by Kenneth E. Iverson while at Harvard University. The language, originally titled “Iverson Notation”, was designed to overcome the inherent ambiguities and points of confusion found when dealing with standard mathematical notation. It was later described in 1962 in a book simply titled “A Programming Language” (hence APL). Towards the end of the sixties, largely through the efforts of IBM, the computer community gained its first exposure to APL. Iverson received the Turing Award in 1979 for this work. APL is a user-oriented notation, particularly well suited for communication from people to other people or to computers. The notation consists of a set of symbols (letters, numbers, punctuation, algebra, and special shapes), with a very simple set of rules (syntax) for putting them together to describe the processing of data.
