Thread: questions about preferences
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Old 12-23-2017, 08:16 AM   #16
davidfor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan View Post
My God! A mathematic programming language!
When I was at university, a lecturer told a story of how APL came about:

An IBM scientist needed to do some linear programming and was frustrated with how long it took to write out. So he decided he needed language to express this easily. When he finished, he had a page with the notation for all the actions he needed. He wrote "A Programming Language" across the top of the page, and went to lunch. While he was away, someone came in, found the page and thought, "I'd better write a compiler for this."

When the lecturer told this story, I was amused and didn't believe it. But, after my first year at IBM, I wasn't so sure. And nothing in the other ten years I spent there convinced me either way.
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