Talk:APL (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:44, 6 September 2004

Revision as of 02:49, 6 September 2004

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*# I miss the user data type features provided by Backus [[FL programming language|FL]] (several of the more powerful J ideas come from [[FP programming language|FP]] via FL)

*# ditto for the exception handling mechanism in FL

*# direct, primitive support for dictionaries ([[K programming language|K]]'s handling of its namespaces through standard dictionaries would be very nice to have) and trees.

*# pattern-based case parsing at function definition time (''à la'' [[Miranda]] or [[Haskell]])

*# full, Perl-level, primitive support for regular expressions (currently it is handled through a library)

*# the fact that not all primitives work transparently on both dense and sparse arrays (although many do)

*# the fact that its Linux version runs on a Java-built interface, instead of, say, Qt.

*# K's mature support for data warehouses and other OLAP-related tasks.

*# last, but never least... a different way of encoding the dictionary verbs (J uses the idea of ''extended'' base characters for related functions, so that if <code>+</code> means something, then <code>+.</code> means something related and <code>+:</code> means something else related too... the problem is that all my years of reading have though my brain to see the '.' and ':' chars as ''separators'' and it is very hard to learn to see them attached to another character in an undivisible pair... furthermore, there is ''no'' lexical distinction between the monadyc and dyadic uses of a verb, making it even more difficult to parse what already are very dense (in the information-load sense) expressions.)

*In the end, though, J is the most powerful language I have ever used, and I would not consider anything else (except some kind of J descendant) to use as my main programming tool, at any price. When I work with J, I ''see'' things differently, in a fun, always entertaining way. Hope this helps a bit. &mdash; [[User:Danakil|danakil]] 02:44, Sep 6, 2004 (UTC)