skywriter wrote:
just run GnuAPL. it's just as much fun but without the nifty keyboard. I studied it, used it, and like so many other things in life with not practical application, prompty forgot it.
Might not be as unpractical as you think, though: APL is still used today quite a lot indeed. In fact, it is even nowadays accepted at
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/phd/fields/ ... index.html
. I certainly would not feel ok if I had to write financial, actuarial or statistical programs in Fortran, Pascal or C, no.
Regarding the "nifty" keyboard. Granted, unless you have a proper APL keyboard, it takes a few minutes to get used to the location of all them funny symbols [it's just a question of your flexibility]. Actually, APL versions exist which utilise keywords instead of symbols [which, in my opinion, destroys the elegance of APL completely], and ASCII transliterations have been devised as well [which are even worse, see J].
BTW, APL influenced the design of a few other languages: 4.2.6 in the original
Mathematica
book lists some correspondences between APL and Mathematica. And Nial is a cross of APL and LISP [quite a few years ago I'd contributed an Irix port; while not so important, its Reference Manual is the best I've ever come across].
Lastly, back in the '80s, e.g. I wrote, purely in APL, an interface to RAMIS II [the DBMS we then utilised] - you could retrieve data, manipulate them in APL in ways no DBMS will ever provide facilities for, and upload the results afterwards...My staff liked it.