[Beowulf] Parallel Development Tools

James Cownie jcownie at cantab.net
Wed Oct 17 11:56:09 PDT 2007


On 17 Oct 2007, at 16:20, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, Gerry Creager wrote:
>
>> Quote...
>> "Three things in life a man must do,
>> Before his days are done.
>> Write two lines of APL...
>> And make the sucker run."
>>
>> OK, so it's not PL-I but APL was another interesting beast.  A  
>> friend had written an entire StarTrek game, including a 3d  
>> universe, in APL and we wasted cycles waiting for long jobs on the  
>> Amdahl 470v6 to complete that way...
>
> Great little poem.  I didn't write tic-tac-toe -- zero sum games that
> always can be drawn being a bit on the boring side -- but I did write
> MasterMind (the code-breaking game) on an IBM 5100 in APL.
> ...
> It took more than two lines of APL, though...
>

IIRC if you compress your APL (using tricks like ", 0 \rho" to  
concatenate two lines into one), you end up with every line starting  
with a goto arrow because you can't branch out of the middle of a  
line (or into the middle, come to that).

Back, slightly on topic, it's worth remembering that APL is a  
supremely data-parallel language

--
-- Jim
--
James Cownie <jcownie at cantab.net>






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