Re: Improvements to gnuapl

[Blake McBride]

Just my two cents.  I've never had a problem with what Chris is saying.  In fact, I think adding if/else as described earlier would make APL not APL.

If you want if/else as described earlier, just write your own apl'ish language.

(I wrote my first APL 41 years ago.)

Blake

On Sun, Feb 21, 2021 at 3:55 PM Chris Moller <moller@mollerware.com> wrote:

What's wrong with good old-fashioned computed-goto like:

  1 testit y
  2 v←hello first second byebye
  3 →(y=⍳⍴v)/v
  4 hello: 'hello'
  5 →byebye
  6 first: 'first'
  7 →byebye
  8 second: 'second'
  9 byebye: 'byebye' 

variations of which work fine as if/then/else, case statements, and while/until?

(Or is that too old-fashioned? I wrote my first line of APL almost 50 years ago...)

On 2/20/21 1:59 PM, Christian Robert wrote:

well I saw the new thrends aka Quad-XML, Quad-JSON, Quad-FFT and so on

but I think thoses will never be used in real life or quite seldom.

I really think that Juergen should be looking at

:if/:elseif/:else/:endif

:for var :in array
  loop
:endfor

:while condition:
  loop
:endwhile

:do
  loop
:until condition

this will eases newcommers to the language.

I know that APL goal is to do a whole "program" in one or two lines of code...
but the language must accomodate newcommers.

I asked for that several years ago (may me 8 or 10 years)

Juergen ansewered at that time "this can be done" but I wont yet

well my principal next improvements wish list is if/for/while/do_until

my real though,

Xtian.