greg (11/22/82)
I would be interested in starting a discussion on improvement of the
APL programming environment. What nice aspects of other programming
environments would people like to see? Examples that come to mind
are:
1) nice history mechanism - have the computer remember the last
several things you did, and allow you to edit and re-execute
lines previously typed.
2) make it more convenient to do more than one thing at the same
time (have a nice multi-processing capability that is integrated
into the APL world)
3) have files appear to be APL arrays. Instead of doing quad-opens,
quad-seeks, etc., I would like to manipulate the contents of
a file without realizing it is not a garden-variety APL character
vector, numeric matrix, or whatever else I want it to be.
4) have a nice screen-oriented APL text editor; perhaps have a fancy
trace mode in which APL expressions get highlighted on the
screen as they are executed.
There are APL implementations that have fairly nice environments.
How about providing descriptions of particularly nice or novel
features of some of them?
- Greg Johnson
U Wis - Madison