Re: [Bug-apl] A modest proposal: user-defined commands

[David B. Lamkins]

On Sat, 2014-05-03 at 15:02 +0200, Juergen Sauermann wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> from what I hear Dyalog APL seems to be a good interpreter and I have no 
> problem with it.
> I am only a little more conservative when it comes to new and 
> non-standard APL features.
> But Peter Teeson had ideas going into a similar direction.

I hope I didn't give the impression that I was casting aspersions on
Dyalog. They've taken APL in some new and interesting directions. All I
meant is that many of Dyalog's contributions to the language tend to be
outside of the canon of ISO/IBM APL 2.

> 
> One question that I have is how the implementation of a new command 
> would look like.
> Is it an APL function (which basically means that the command only 
> relieves the user
> from quoting the argument of the command) or would it be implemented in 
> or C++
> like native functions?
> 

As I envisioned it: the former. Just some syntactic sugaring around an
APL function.

> And do we know how often this feature in Dyalog was used in real life?

Its used to provide access to many of their development tools.

See http://docs.dyalog.com/13.2/User%20Commands.pdf .