It also required a special keyboard because of its usage of the Greek
alphabet. As I recall a line of code was executed from right to left also
(which is probably why it didn't receive great acceptance). Drs. Iverson and
Faulkopf were the creators I believe. They were IBM fellows.

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Perdue [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2005 2:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Wall Street Journal Artical on computer language
proliferation


I remember learning in the mid-70's a language that had a beautiful syntax
and
was elegant in execution. It was very powerfull - a single statement of less
than 10 characters could create a three dimensional matrix, populate it with
random numbers and then invert the entire matrix. It was difficult to learn
as
it had two different modes: monadic and dyadic (some of you may now know the
name of the language). As I remember it was targeted more towards math
functions. Also, if memory serves, it was: A Programming Language - APL. And
(I
think) for a short time there was a compiler available on the 3000 series
II.

Quoting "William L. Brandt" <[log in to unmask]>:

> Anybody read this?
>
> Interesting article - in essence they said that there has been an
explosion
> of languages - many needlessly - to the consternation of Microsoft which
> would like to control software developers.
>
> Gosh I came from an era when there was COBOL, FORTRAN, and assembler.
>
> Now there's Ruby On Rails (actually a system to work on a language called
> Ruby), C, Perl, Python, PHP, TCL, Java, Ajax, Flash (for buiilding web
> sites), Dojo, Domo Arigato (ok, just made the last one up.....)
>
> Bill

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