What is the correct result?

[johnb]

(03-21-2024 08:24 PM)carey Wrote:  

(03-21-2024 07:08 PM)John Keith Wrote:  J seems even less readable than APL to me due to the seemingly random use of ASCII characters for mathematical operations. And people think RPL is unreadable. Harrumph!

Yes, while APL’s eventual character set (not fully formed in Iverson’s 1962 book “A Programming Language”) was constrained to use characters (glyphs) that could be included in an IBM selectric typewriter font ball, at last APL glyphs evoke some visual connection to their name or function (e.g., grade up ⍋, grade down ⍒), little visual connection between ASCII symbols and name is found in J, whose appearance has justifiably been described as “line noise.” While a pain to use, APL glyphs are an endearing feature of APL, and are iconic (pun intended).

It may be of interest that ELI is a largely ISO APL compatible APL variant (with additional features e.g., complex #’s, tables, etc.) that also uses an ASCII character set, but unlike J, ELI’s ASCII character set bears at least some visual connection with APL glyphs, names or functions (e.g., compare iota ⍳ (iota in APL) to ! (iota in ELI). Having such visual cues to APL glyphs while using an ASCII font is a nice feature of ELI.

And then, there are software people in the world who make programming languages that are deliberately warped or obtuse: Intercal (created as a joke at Princeton in 1972), which stands for "Computer Language With No Pronounceable Acronym", was one of the earliest. (http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/)

There are others, some with even more delicious names: Maleboge (named after Dante's 8th Circle of Hell), LOLCode*, and BrainF**k. The "Whitespace" language treats only the whitespace characters (space, tab, and return) as syntactically significant, rendering it devilishly difficult to read, but also allowing the developer to steganographically embed their real program in a trivial C, Pascal, or other program, enabling plausible deniability. (Put that in your good programming practices pipe and try to smoke it!)

Reading RPL is, by comparison to these, like reading "Fun With Dick and Jane."

And then there was my own humble contribution, PATHETIC. So named because most programmers had written at least one program in it anyway, as evidenced by someone looking over your shoulder at a printout and commenting, "Gee, that's PATHETIC."


______________
* LOLCode version of "Hello World":

Code:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE