APL and descendants - was Re: If C is so evil why is it so successful?

Pete Lancashire pete at petelancashire.com
Fri Apr 14 16:13:34 CDT 2017


Love to have my Selectric in a desk APL terminal again.

-pete

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 2:02 PM, dwight via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> To my knowledge, there is only one person that claims to
>
> have a cartridge for the APL on the VideoBrain. He considers it
>
> more valuable than gold and won't let anyone look at it or
>
> dump its contents.
>
> Such code running on a VideoBrain would surely warrant the /S
>
> label for "Small".
>
> Without some form of bank switching the resources of the VideoBrain
>
> are minimal.
>
> It has almost no RAM and the decoding has mirrored images through
>
> the address space.
>
> The F8 was clearly intended as an embedded controller similar to
>
> the Rockwell PPS4.
>
> Dwight
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Eric
> Christopherson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2017 8:22:32 PM
> To: Jecel Assumpcao Jr. via cctalk
> Subject: Re: APL and descendants - was Re: If C is so evil why is it so
> successful?
>
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2017, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. via cctalk wrote:
> > Toby Thain via cctalk wrote on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:34:08 -0400
> > > On 2017-04-13 6:54 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> > > > So, whence APL today?
> > >
> > > Still lives on -- Dyalog, J, K, etc. Recently discovered the #jsoftware
> > > channel on Freenode for APL fans.
> >
> > I consider Matlab and Julia to be spiritual descendents of APL.
> >
> > One thing that hurt APL in early microcomputers was that they used text
> > mode with the wrong font. I would also have guessed that Basic could
> > work better in really limited hardware, but some early APL
> > implementations were impressively frugal.
>
> The VideoBrain home computer had something called APL/S, but I can't
> find any information on how it differs from APL. Does anyone know?
>
> --
>         Eric Christopherson
>
>


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