Comment by mlochbaum
10 months ago
Dunno why electroly is dragging me into this but I believe you've misread the article. When it says "His languages take significantly after APL" it means the languages themselves and not their implementations.
10 months ago
Dunno why electroly is dragging me into this but I believe you've misread the article. When it says "His languages take significantly after APL" it means the languages themselves and not their implementations.
The article: "Let's make sense of the C code by the APL guy"
Do you think the article meant to say it was more likely that the code wasn't inspired by APL?
I think the article expresses no position. Most source code for array languages is not, in fact, inspired by APL. I encourage you to check a few random entries at [0]; Kap and April are some particularly wordy implementations, and even A+ mostly consists of code by programmers other than Whitney, with a variety of styles.
I do agree that Whitney was inspired to some extent by APL conventions (not exclusively; he was quite a Lisp fan and that's the source of his indentation style when he writes multi-line functions, e.g. in [1]). The original comment was not just a summary of this claim but more like an elaboration, and began with the much stronger statement "The way to understand Arthur Whitney's C code is to first learn APL", which I moderately disagree with.
[0] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/List_of_open-source_array_languages
[1] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
I unfortunately glossed over the part of the original comment that gives it substance: "The most obvious of the typographic stylings--the lack of spaces, single-character names, and functions on a single line--are how he writes APL too."
That's backing for a claim.
Also, I haven't once written APL. I think this might've been borderline trolling, just because of how little investment I have in the topic in reality. Sorry.