APL (a programming language)

APL  (a programming language)

This programming language was developed by Harvard
(later IBM) researcher Kenneth E. Iverson in the early 1960s
as a way to express mathematical functions clearly and
consistently for computer use. The power of the language
to compactly express mathematical functions attracted a
growing number of users, and APL soon became a full gen-
eral-purpose computing language.
Like many versions of BASIC, APL is an interpreted lan-
guage, meaning that the programmer’s input is evaluated
“on the fly,” allowing for interactive response

nlike BASIC or FORTRAN, however, APL has
direct and powerful support for all the important mathe-
matical functions involving arrays or matrices.

APL has over 100 built-in operators, called “primitives.”


With just one or two operators the programmer can per-
form complex tasks such as extracting numeric or trigono-
metric functions, sorting numbers, or rearranging arrays
and matrices. (Indeed, APL’s greatest power is in its ability
to manipulate matrices directly without resorting to explicit
loops or the calling of external library functions.)

To give a very simple example, the following line of APL
code:

X [D X]
sorts the array X. In most programming languages this
would have to be done by coding a sorting algorithm in a
dozen or so lines of code using nested loops and temporary
variables.
However, APL has also been found by many program-
mers to have significant drawbacks. Because the language
uses Greek letters to stand for many operators, it requires
the use of a special type font that was generally not available
on non-IBM systems. A dialect called J has been devised to
use only standard ASCII characters, as well as both simpli-
fying and expanding the language. Many programmers find
mathematical expressions in APL to be cryptic, making
programs hard to maintain or revise. Nevertheless, APL
Special Interest Groups in the major computing societies
testify to continuing interest in the language


APL  (a programming language
APL  (a programming language

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