Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: Invoking a function from a list of functions

[Rusi]

On Monday, November 12, 2018 at 8:50:09 PM UTC+5:30, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Rusi wrote:
> > And APL has fallen off the radar... unfortunate.
> 
> There's a bit of renewed (academic) interest, tho.  Not exactly in APL,
> but in array languages of the same family (i.e. using the same concepts but
> without the exotic character set).
> 
> See for example http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/pete/research/esop-2014.html

Interesting!

| The array-computational model pioneered by 
| Iverson’s languages APL and J offers a simple 

…

| Our type system’s principal contribution is that it serves to extract the
| implicit control structure that provides so much of the language’s 
| expressive power, making this structure explicitly apparent at compile time

Less known

Arthur Whitney is a Canadian computer scientist most notable for developing 
three programming languages inspired by APL: A+, K, and Q and for cofounding 
the U.S. company Kx Systems…
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scientist) ]

A+ is free software and available in the debian repos
Last I knew the proprietary K,Q cost $ 25,000 per seat (!!)
Above may explain at least partly why people are willing to pay so much for the
speed!

On the more syntactic side I happen to hold more fringe views:

http://blog.languager.org/2015/02/universal-unicode.html
In more detail: http://blog.languager.org/2015/03/whimsical-unicode.html

Some corresponding python thoughts and facts:
http://blog.languager.org/2014/04/unicoded-python.html

Some few more things do work in haskell:
http://blog.languager.org/2014/05/unicode-in-haskell-source.html

Bottom Line: APL's character set was ‘exotic’ in its day
Unicode cannot reasonably called exotic in 2018