Re: APL & Lojban

[Edward Cherlin <cherlin@CAUCE.ORG>]

At 10:26 PM -0700 10/26/97, Irene Gates wrote:
>la .iVAN. cusku di'e
>
>> Karl Andrews wrote:
>>> I originally became interested in Loglan and then Lojban as a means for
>>> sharpening my thinking in general, somewhat in the same manner that APL
>>> did for my math-oriented thinking. What jumped out at me was here are
>two
>>> other Lojban people who were familiar with APL. [...]
>
>> For what it's worth, I am also sort of familiar with APL, although I
>haven't
>> used it much; and I don't know if Irene Gates is still on this list, but
>she
>> made her bread programming in APL for several years.

Did I mention that I was Managing Editor of APL News for 8 years, and that
I organized and ran an APL development project? I-APL, Ltd. produced the
first ANSI/ISO standard APL, made it fully portable from the Apple ][ to
UNIX workstations, and put it out in English, French, German, Finnish,
Russian, and Japanese.

>I think the
>regularity
>> is a real one: my appreciation of APL and of Lojban share the same source
>--
>> a liking for the unusual plus a fondness of conciseness.
>
>.a'a .a'u .ie  Yes, I'm still here, I saw this thread, and only an acute
>lack of time prevented me from chiming in.  I did give it some thought,
>though, and came to the same conclusion that Ivan did, although pe'i su'a
>Lojban is only really concise when it comes to the attitudinals and things.

Actually, Lojban is very concise for complex tenses and in some areas of
relational algebra, set theory, and other areas with well-defined
mathematical structures. It does suffer considerably from the efforts of
developers who didn't understand what they were building, but that's normal
in any new area of math, software, and conlangs.

>co'o mi'e .airinix.
>
>---
>Irene A Gates                         <70732.244@compuserve.com>
>Burlington, Ontario, Ca             Aviculturist and linguaphile
>
>"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it"  -- Emerson

How far are you from Toronto? You might enjoy a visit to Iverson Software.
Iverson's latest invention is an enhanced APL called J with nested arrays
(forests in CS terms), arrays of functions, user-defined operators, and
combinatory logic programming, among other goodies. For example,

   mean =. +/ % #  NB. NB. is comment. Mean is defined as sum divided-by tally
                   NB. where tally is the length of the first dimension. Thus

   +square =. 3 3 $ 8 1 6 3 5 7 4 9 2 NB. magic square
8 1 6
3 5 7
4 9 2
   $ square
3 3
   # square
3

   mean square     NB. column means. Default for operators is first dimension
5 5 5
                   NB. not last as in old APL. It doesn't matter for a magic
                   NB. square, of course.
   +/ square
15 15 15
      15 15 15 % 3
5 5 5

--
Edward Cherlin, President      <http://www.cauce.org/>
Help outlaw Spam by supporting Rep. Chris Smith's bill
and opposing the other bills supported by the spammers
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.1748:>