GNU APL 1.0 available

[Posted October 2, 2013 by n8willis]

From:		Juergen Sauermann <juergen.sauermann-AT-t-online.de>
To:		info-gnu-AT-gnu.org
Subject:		GNU APL
Date:		Fri, 27 Sep 2013 15:02:08 +0200
Message-ID:		<524581D0.9080502@t-online.de>

Hello,

I am happy to announce that, after a few years of development, GNU APL 
1.0 has been released.

APL is an ancient programming language.
GNU APL has the latest and greatest features (nested arrays, complex 
numbers, shared variables)
and is intended to be a full implementation of the ISO standard 13751 
"Programming Language APL, Extended".

The GNU APL project lives at: |http://www.gnu.org/software/apl

and can be downloaded from: ||ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/apl/ or any GNU mirror.

Bug reports and other suggestions can be sent to bug-apl@gnu.org.

Have fun!

Dr. Jürgen Sauermann
Author and Maintainer of GNU APL
|
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GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu@gnu.org>
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu

GNU APL 1.0 available

Posted Oct 3, 2013 17:23 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

One line from GNU APLs site just makes me sooo sad: If you just want to quickly give GNU APL a try, and if you are very lucky (which includes having shared libraries libreadline.so.5 and liblapack.so.3gf installed on your machine) then you could try out the GNU APL binary apl in the directory apl. This MAY work on a 32-bit i686 Ubuntu. Chances are, however, that it does NOT work, Please DO NOT report any problems if the binary does not run on your machine.

Does anyone still want to say that ABI mess only affects evil proprietary corporations after that?

GNU APL 1.0 available

Posted Oct 3, 2013 20:03 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

My thought: If there are so many restrictions on it and it's so unlikely to work, why even offer it?

GNU APL 1.0 available

Posted Oct 3, 2013 21:49 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

My thought: If there are so many restrictions on it and it's so unlikely to work, why even offer it?

Well, if you read the description you'll find out that it's actually LSB package which is “supported perfectly by debian”.

Apparently nowadays “supported perfectly” is supposed to read as “if you are very lucky” but hey, soon everything will change! We just had no time to solve this problem, we only try to that for last twelve years, you know. But soon everything will be a-okay. Trust us.

GNU APL 1.0 available

Posted Mar 29, 2014 0:32 UTC (Sat) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

libreadline and lapack are not part of the LSB standard, so people trying to make portable binaries are supposed to bundle them, link statically to them, or document the dependency.

GNU APL 1.0 available

Posted Oct 4, 2013 0:40 UTC (Fri) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link]

Am I the only one that thought this was about a license?

(either Affero or Apache)

GNU APL 1.0 available

Posted Oct 10, 2013 3:13 UTC (Thu) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

Indeed, my congratulations to the author. APL and J, its somewhat rethought dialect, deserve much wider exposure. Having solid, free software implementations of each is nothing short of miraculous.

It often amazes me how little of the creativity of people like Ken Iverson in the 1960s is familiar to people nowadays, who often re-invent, poorly, matters which they gave vast consideration. Such array libraries as numpy in python would have been far more useful if they had taken note of the importance of rank, as it is used in APL and J, and if they had implemented some of the extremely orthogonal primitives from this language family. It is still my hope that this will eventually happen.

Other proprietary languages like IDL which claimed to be "derived" from APL missed even the basics. It took 20 years for IDL to support arrays with zero dimension in a given rank, requiring one to awkwardly preseed an array and later strip off the seed after concatenating a series of results to it.

GNU APL 1.0 available

Posted Mar 28, 2014 5:43 UTC (Fri) by Ainsley31415926 (guest, #96245) [Link]

Ancient indeed! Its the same age as me.

I would like to add my congratulations and thanks for delivering APL to my keyboard.

It is a breath of fresh air amidst these new fangled tangled emperor clothes modern things like C++.

Now I just need to find time to play with it.