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by RodgerTheGreat
371 days ago
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The point is that every idiom beagle3 noted is a simple and straightforward combination of general building-blocks, whereas nearly all of your "equivalents" are a one-off special-cased feature or function that needs to be learned on its own. The power and expressiveness of APL-family languages comes from the fact that they have a very small number of well-chosen parts that can be combined in flexible ways. Those patterns of combination become a higher-level vocabulary that fluent programmers grasp at sight, much as experienced readers of English learn to recognize the shapes of entire words at a time. This type of visual pattern recognition is facilitated by brevity. APL-style idioms are not at all comparable to functions on a class or within a library, because idioms are self-describing in their entirety, requiring only an understanding of the primitive operators of the language, whereas a named function obscures and subordinates detail. |
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