Talk:Vector Pascal

Wirth, Pascal, and APL

This from an APL evangelist's personal history: [1]

I met Larry as a result of a talk I'd given as one of a series on "Programming Languages" conducted by the Computer Science Department. He expressed an interest in what I'd had to say about what I was doing in the School of Business with the notation described in A Programming Language. He and Phil Abrams took action on this interest in a very real, very Productive way when the IBM Systems Journal article, appeared. What they did, and its aftermath, is described in Appendix A, an annotated verse history of APL's early days.

Larry and Phil not only developed the batch APL interpreter I mention in the verse, they did so many other things that I wish they and others involved in APL's origins would get them down on paper. For example, one of them should tell the story of Elsie (for Low Cost), an APL mini before there were minis.

But, in essence, all I did was happen to be around, saying the right things to the right people. Things took off when the right people got together.

Incidentally, one of the people involved in the Programming Languages seminar to which I referred above was Niklaus Wirth. Unfortunately, Klaus didn't get the proper message from my talk. He went his own way and developed PASCAL.

This from Stanford University: [2]

Kenneth E. Iverson's book, "A Programming Language" [New York: Wiley, 1962], presented a highly elegant language for the description and analysis of algorithms. Although not widely acclaimed at first, "Iverson notation" (referred to as "the language" in this report) is coming to be recognized as an important tool by computer scientists and programmers. The current report contains an up-to-date definition of a subset of the language, based on recent work by Iverson and his colleagues. Chapter III describes an interpreter for the language, written jointly by the author and Lawrence M. Breed of IBM. The remainder of the paper consists of critiques of the implementation and the language, with suggestions for improvement. This report was originally submitted in fulfillment of a Computer Science 239 project supervised by Professor Niklaus Wirth, Stanford University, May 30, 1966.

So I think it's reasonable to conclude that Wirth did, in fact, "get it". He just chose not to "go there". Which I think is unfortunate, since while APL is very poorly suited for most problems history has shown that a compiler can benefit enormously from explicit structures that advise it that parallelisation is expected. MarkMLl (talk) 08:46, 13 October 2013 (UTC)