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From: "David C. Hoos, Sr." <david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com>
Subject: Re: Ada95 speed
Date: 1999/06/06
Message-ID: <hXL7XKJs#GA.194@newstoo.hiwaay.net>#1/1
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References: <IDnjBkAs#GA.243@newstoo.hiwaay.net> <7jer69$j8n@lotho.delphi.com>
 <7jf27g$94g$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-06-06T00:00:00+00:00
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Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:7jf27g$94g$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <7jer69$j8n@lotho.delphi.com>,
>   tmoran@bix.com wrote:
> > >In those days, I was as big a fan of APL for the kind of work
> I was doing
> > >as I am of Ada today.
> > There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents ... ;)
>
>
> Actually, Ada does not BEGIN to compare in ease of use to APL
> for programs for which APL is well suited. Ultimately Ada is
> still an efficiency-oriented lowish level language, and cannot
> compete for ease of expression with true very high level
> languages like APL. That's not a criticism of Ada, just a
> reminder that Ada is NOT the only useful language in the world
> (and you should recognize this even if you are an Ada fan :-)
>
As Robert correctly points out, the key is the suitableness of the
language to the problem being solved.

I was using APL for ad hoc solutions to engineering problems,
and if I were still doing that kind of work, I'd probably still
be doing it in APL.

It doesn't take much to realize that a language which has matrix
inversion as a primitive, is a pretty high-level language.

It also had a nice way of dealing with equality tests for
floating point values.  A system variable called "fuzz" could
be set to specify the magnitude of the relative difference
below which the two values would be considered equal.

But, since this is not comp.lang.apl or alt.lang.apl, I'd
probably best not keep this thread going.