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Domain: chilton.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to chilton.com.

Comments · 6

  1. That programmer never saw APL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on CPAN: $677 Million of Perl

    APL is the language that went out of the ASCII set to be able to be compressed farther. Here is a wiki article, Why APL and an extended code sample (slow .gif).

  2. Re:How about the internet over short wave? by ch-chuck · · Score: 4, Interesting · on Shortwave Radio and The PC

    Sure, you can even have Internet over Carrier Pigeon, just don't expect it to perform very well! Much more interesting is Shortwave Radio over the Internet.

    When I played around w/ Packet Radio there were a lot of problems, collisions, weak transmitters come and go, the retries and lag time is tremendous - the buzz at the time was: don't expect to be able to d/l PacMan video games using Packet! Whats the max packet baud rate these days? 9600? On HF it's even lower.

    At work I can ping a remote site and get a response in about 70 milliseconds, going thru about 20 routers. Packet radio can't touch that.

    Look into PSK31, it's an interesting active mode these days for point-to-point qso's, an HF chat room if you will.

  3. Re:Will this kill Slashdot? by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 3, Funny · on DeCSS' Continuing Saga

    What is it about Perl that tends to make its proponets enjoy making write-only code?

    They're frustrated APL wanna-bes?

  4. Re:APL by Aldreis · · Score: 1 · on Esoteric Programming Languages

    Well, I guess it had a use after all....

    Well, use enough to let me buy my first house...:-)

    I was an APL consultant for four years, mainly for international IBM shops. It was indeed a wonderful, symbolic, naturally cryptic ( warning: big gif of the non-ASCII charset ) language, delightful to use ( once you really grokked it ) just because of the amazing power of its one-liners...:-)

    See this for a commented one-liner that calculates and prints all prime numbers between 1 and a given N, in 17 characters...

  5. APL: naturally obfuscated... :-) by Aldreis · · Score: 1 · on IOCCC Accepting New, 'Improved' Entries


    I humbly cast my vote on APL... It is a symbolic, naturally cryptic ( warning: big gif of the non-ASCII charset ) language, delightful to use ( once you really grokked it ) just because of the amazing power of its one-liners...:-)

  6. Re:Programming Environments: Then And Now by Animats · · Score: 2 · on Jordan Pollack Answers AI And IP Questions
    APL and LISP are Very High Level "applicative/functional" programming languages. They are too high level to be translated into machine language (with current technology). For this reason, they are interpreted--as is done with Java; hence they tend to execute relatively slowly.
    Actually, APL, LISP, and Java can be hard-compiled to machine code. LISP usually is. Java sometimes is; SGI has a hard-code Java compiler. (This is separate from all the JIT compiler stuff.) APL is an interesting case, as there are a whole class of optimizations possible for APL because of the regularity of the language and the direct representation of operations on collections. There's a forgotten technology of APL optimization, although remnants of it live on as massively parallel techniques for supercomputers. Incidentally, Hard-code APL compilers have been written. (There's even OpenAPL for Linux!)

    The "language as entire environment" idea recurs frequently. BASIC is the classic example. Turbo Pascal and Smalltalk were also closed world. But with the widespread availability of good integrated development environments, there's less need for such schemes than there used to be. Today, you can write in C++ and have all the ease-of-use facilities, including a source-level debugger, you had in the closed environments of old.

    Of course, if you're stuck using GCC on Linux, you may feel you're missing something.