APLs and related languages

APLs

The original APL\1130 spawned many children:

While implementing sometimes quite different features, these all shared the distinctive APL character set. A late addition to this group is Richard Smith's [http://www.vector.org.uk/archive/v212/rowan.htm Rowan], an APL interpeter constructed from .Net assemblies.

Of these, APL2, SAX and VSAPL are in use primarily to maintain legacy systems. APL2000, APLX and Dyalog APL are in use for new systems development.

A+

In the 1980s, [wiki:WikiPedia/Arthur_Whitney Arthur Whitney] designed an all-ASCII subset of APL for Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. This language [http://www.aplusdev.org A+], became the principal platform for trading-room applications for about 15 years, and has since been published by Morgan Stanley.

J

From about 1990 [wiki:WikiPedia/Kenneth_E._Iverson Ken Iverson] worked with [wiki:WikiPedia/Roger_Hui Roger Hui] and others on a successor to APL, abandoning the distinctive SpecialCharacters and naming all the primitives from the ASCII character set. This became known as the wiki:WikiPedia/J_programming_language J programming language]. It is used by an active community of largely solo programmers.

K

In the 1990s Arthur Whitney wrote the [wiki:WikiPedia/K_programming_language K programming language], a blend of APL and Lisp, as a proprietary successor to A+. Like J, it uses only ASCII characters. K is the basis of the KDB inverted-column database, and of the less-terse Q programming language.

Other languages

Other languages have made heavy borrowings from APL: MATLAB, Mathematica, R and S.

APL has exercised a strong influence on languages designed for [wiki:WikiPedia/Functional_programming functional programming].

Other sources

CategoryAboutApl