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by bike4beer 3379 days ago
Really what does this have to do with APL ( Ken Iverson )??

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This is NOT APL.

Futhark is a functional language, we will start with the obligatory factorial program:

fun fact (n: i32): i32 = reduce () 1 (map (1+) (iota n))

This has nothing to do with APL.

Perhaps a more apt title would be "Python for the GPU".j

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There is a paper on this subject, where an APL interpreter is written in FUTARK, but then most compilers are written in C. In reality the technology in question is Futark on GPU.

https://futhark-lang.org/publications/fhpc16.pdf

3 comments

Thanks, a moderator updated the submission title to clarify.

(Submitted title was "Futhark: APL on the GPU".)

> Perhaps a more apt title would be "Python for the GPU"

Why Python? Futhark is a purely functional language and looks a lot like Haskell, so I think "Haskell for the GPU" would be a better title

(Author here.)

OCaml would be an even more apt comparison.

I find it a bit ironic that of all the related submissions I (and others) have made, it's the one with the bizarre title that hits the front page!

Might be related to that GPU-accelerated APL compiler which was on the front page a week or so ago
I don't disagree. Charitably, 'APL' can be read as an ordinary acronym for 'a programming language' rather than the proper name of a programming language.