In defence of C

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Oct 28 18:32:55 UTC 2005


On 10/28/05, Kevin Cozens <kcozens-qazKcTl6WRFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> > Alex is right about the terseness; I recall that programs were rarely more
> > than 60 characters long. You'd type the handful of characters on the
> > typewriter, hit enter, and stand back as reams of output spewed out. I
> > would say that APL makes Perl look like COBOL.
>
> Many years ago, BYTE magazine published one program in an APL theme issue
> which was longer than 60 characters. It was John Conway's Game of Life in
> single line of APL containing approximately 200 characters.

When my brother was at the Mutual Group, back in the '90s, he
implemented Tetris in APL.  Apparently quite playable :-).

Late in the '90s, he was one of the lead developers on a configuration
system used by IBM for RS/6K systems which was all in APL.  People had
been trying to develop replacement systems in other languages for
about 15 years; the problem was sufficiently dynamic that attempts to
use anything "COBOL-like" (whether that be COBOL, or
not-terribly-dynamic usages of C, C++, and such) kept failing
miserably.
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