APL
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'''APL''', known best as "that programming language with all the weird symbols", was developed by Kenneth E. Iverson at IBM in 1960, based on a mathematical notation he had devised in 1957 and published in a book called ''A Programming Language'', from which the language's name came. | '''APL''', known best as "that programming language with all the weird symbols", was developed by Kenneth E. Iverson at IBM in 1960, based on a mathematical notation he had devised in 1957 and published in a book called ''A Programming Language'', from which the language's name came. | ||
| − | APL is capable of expressing complicated mathematical expressions such as various forms of matrix manipulation in a concise notation which makes use of a number of specialized symbols. Since these symbols were not part of the usual character sets (such as [[ASCII]] and [[EBCDIC]]) in use at the time the language was developed (though they have since been added to [[Unicode]] and can hence be expressed in modern character encodings such as [[UTF-8]]), a [[APL | + | APL is capable of expressing complicated mathematical expressions such as various forms of matrix manipulation in a concise notation which makes use of a number of specialized symbols. Since these symbols were not part of the usual character sets (such as [[ASCII]] and [[EBCDIC]]) in use at the time the language was developed (though they have since been added to [[Unicode]] and can hence be expressed in modern character encodings such as [[UTF-8]]), a [[APL code page|specialized character set]] was used, often implemented as a separate type ball for IBM Selectric printing terminals. |
== References == | == References == | ||
Revision as of 17:58, 25 November 2012
APL, known best as "that programming language with all the weird symbols", was developed by Kenneth E. Iverson at IBM in 1960, based on a mathematical notation he had devised in 1957 and published in a book called A Programming Language, from which the language's name came.
APL is capable of expressing complicated mathematical expressions such as various forms of matrix manipulation in a concise notation which makes use of a number of specialized symbols. Since these symbols were not part of the usual character sets (such as ASCII and EBCDIC) in use at the time the language was developed (though they have since been added to Unicode and can hence be expressed in modern character encodings such as UTF-8), a specialized character set was used, often implemented as a separate type ball for IBM Selectric printing terminals.
