On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 9:19 PM, Peter Teeson
<address@hidden> wrote:
It so happens that 2 of my former colleagues from I.P.Sharp came visiting today and we were chatting about this.
Ken was not in favour of making APL complicated. When I worked at IPSA my office was next to Ken’s
and when someone suggested some form of addition to the language he would usually ask
why we could not do it with an APL function. (These days performance can hardly be a compelling argument
with multiple many-core CPU chips.)
Right now we already have a proliferation of Quad functions not to mention lambdas and native functions.
We also have divergent APLs such as Dyalog (good as it is) and so on.
Complex numbers, rationals and file systems are good additions.
But IMHO we should have one simple mechanism - i.e. the libapl APL API
and all the rest go through that as native functions.
Jurgen’s guiding light is to make GNUAPL an implementation that met the ISO and APL2 definitions.
We have already wondered away from that. Pity. When will it stop?
Just my 02¢
respect
Peter