[eesmith]

It promotes array languages, where operator symbols indicate actions on an n-dimension array (0 = scalar, 1 = vector, 2 = array, etc.)

As a trivial example, A + B means the element-wise addition two arrays, rather than use looping to compute the terms yourself.

The original array language is APL, which is also known for using its own non-ASCII notation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) . To give you a sense of what I mean, the implementation of the Game of Life is:

  life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}

Compare that to how you might implement GoL as a couple of for-loops, with a hard-coded count of the 3x3 neighbor grid. But why use stinking for-loops when you express what the result you want directly, tersely, so you can able see the whole program at once?

(OTOH, as I recall, that implementation uses a fixed-width array, which highlights a limitation to using that approch. For GoL you really want to use Hashlife, which isn't so amenable to an array approach.)

Many of the links here reference K, a descendant of APL which uses ASCII.

[bordercases]

Is there an implementation of an APL-like language which transpiles to SIMD operations at the instruction set level?

[eesmith]

A DDG search for "apl simd" finds https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Performance as the first match:

"APL's array operations are also ideal for implementation with SIMD, or "single instruction, multiple data", operations, that perform a single action on several different values. In some cases, such as scalar functions, the primitives are SIMD operations; in others such as Reverse, they are easily implemented using SIMD—for Reverse, SIMD selection or "shuffle". While experimental SIMD machines (such as the APL-influenced CDC Star-100) were created as early as the 1960s, SIMD computing first entered the personal computing mainstream in the 1990s and has steadily grown in prominence for high-performance computing since then. In APL, CPU vector instruction sets such as Intel's SSE are the most often way to access SIMD optimization, although Co-dfns instead runs on a GPU to attain much higher throughput at the cost of increased overhead and restriction of available algorithms."

[bordercases]

Thank you.

[rpz]

Yes, k

[vardump]

> life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}

Must be fun to type that...

[eesmith]

I copied it from the Wikipedia page, which also shows a layout for an APL keyboard and has a picture with the mechanisms to get your typewriter/printer to handle it.