Re:SAX

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

Ralph M. Deal <deal@kzoo.edu> Wrote:
>I tried to find out more about the LINUX version of SAX last night but
>could find nothing about it on Soliton's site...
http://www.soliton.com is the site. Scroll down a bit, and you'll see
"For information on SHARP APL for Linux: "

and a link there: http://www.soliton.com/Linux

There's a fair amount of text there, and a link to their download site.
Download two files, a 2.1 Mb .tgz withall the software and a 6.4 Mb .pdf
with all the documentation (a professionally organized and written manual
that was originally created in '85, and has been updated greatly since).

>    Thanks for sharing your enthusiasm for APL.
You are quite welcome. Unlike most bigotry, mine is borne from a quarter
century of success stories and accomplishments (mine and others) with APL
and APL-based tools. I use several other languages, but APL has helped
give me an edge in a very competitive marketplace, and the marketplace of
ideas.

>It was somewhat enlightening, somewhat confusing, but made me realize
>that I needed to learn a new alphabet as well as a different method of
>evaluation of a string (right to left is strange to me) if I am to use
>APL as a programming language.

It is difficult to teach as broad a subject as a whole programming
language in the hour+ we have for presentations at KLUG meetings, and
doing more than a walk through of a couple of programs can be very hard,
especailly if the language is umconventional.

The right-to-left-without-precedence choice made by APL's inventor is
actaully a very carefully thought out choice, and was adopted for a number
of reasons. I'll agree that it takes some getting used to, but once you
get used to it, it's hard to go back! Actually, the same reasoning that
brought the "ENTER" key (and no "equals" key) to HP calculators is what
we're talking about here. APL and "reverse-Polish" notations share roots.

It isn't accurate to consider APL a dead language; there is ample evidence
that APL is alive and well, and it is largely in the Computer Science com-
munity that it is considered "dead". This is largely because computer
scientists do not appear to be interested in a language that provides 
notational abstractions for many of the problems they feel are important
for students to learn. 

The rest of the world considers many of these to be solved problems 
(sorting is a good example), and want to go from there to address "real
world" problems, issues that are of practical use to computing profes-
sionals, and are not "trivial" computational or data manipulation
programs. When attempting to solve some of the more difficult problems,
APL provides an outstanding starting point, both as a notation and
for inital implementation. Sometimes, if the resulting APL software 
cannot be adequately optimized  (rare, but it happens), it can be used
as a programming specification for work in other languages, which are less
suitable for research and algorithm construction, but perhaps more
attuned to high performance implementation. 

All of this started with the claim made during the thread about the best
initial programming language. I've made the claim that APL is a very good
choice in this area, and having taught APL to a number of people, mostly
to get them productive in programming in a rather short (1-2 quarters)
time, I beleive I have adequate basis to make such a claim. If we can
get together enough people to make it worthwhile, I could teach a group
here, based on SAX and other APL implementations availabel for Linux.

                                                           Regards,
                                                           ---> RGB <---