Right-to-left (was: Re: entry at other than main)

[Norman Diamond]

I wrote:

>>APL is the infamous right-to-left language.  (APL hackers know that
>>theirs is the only correct language, because right-to-left prioritizing
>>is the same as in English.  [stuff deleted])

In article <230 at ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl> dolf at idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (Dolf Grunbauer) writes:

>I was told that due to the many operators of APL, it is very hard (read:
>impossible) to assign them a priority. So what they did was saying:
>let's give them all the same priority [...]

Yes; this was moderately reasonable.  But why right-to-left instead of
left-to-right?  Take a look at the original APL manual, if you can find
one.  They state the reasoning which I cited, with even more details.

>For those unknown to APL: do you know that APL is so compact that an
>algorithm to get the first N primes can be written in just *ONE* expression
>(of about 25 characters), including the reading of N from the terminal ?

This is true indeed.

Q.  How many APL programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A.  35, and they all have to be in one line.

Incidentally, a few years ago, I.P. Sharp (now part of Reuter) mentioned
that they were embarrassed by the historic excesses of APL programmers,
and they practice better software engineering techniques now ... even in
APL.

--
-- 
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.jp at relay.cs.net)
  The above opinions are inherited by your machine's init process (pid 1),
  after being disowned and orphaned.  However, if you see this at Waterloo or
  Anterior, then their administrators must have approved of these opinions.