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APL/J/K/NIAL

Name: Anonymous 2011-01-08 13:31

What's so special about array languages? When I look at them all I see is a decent Math library on top of a rather poor and antiquated language. On Wikipedia and sites of those languages people rave about how much more concise than other languages they are and how learning them expands your horizons and makes you a better programmer but except for higher order functions, which may have been special at the time APL was invented, but now are present in almost every modern language, I don't see any features that come close to what Haskell, ML, Scala and the likes offer.
Am I missing something?

Name: Anonymous 2011-01-08 13:53

>>3
How can you do complex things with small effort (relative to the effort you need in other languages of course) if they don't have any special language features?

Or do you mean that you have to type less thanks to one/two-character function names?
What really counts imho is semantic conciseness/level of abstraction and not the number of characters.

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