Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 00:49:11 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710230549.AAA10849@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Edward Cherlin Sender: Lojban list From: Edward Cherlin Subject: Re: APL & Lojban (& SWH) X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1821 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Oct 23 00:49:19 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU At 1:36 AM -0700 10/22/97, Veijo Vilva wrote: >la karl cusku di'e >> >> Another observation is that the Lojban Home Page is hosted from Finland. >> Finland was known around the world in the mid-80s as a hotbed of APL >> activity. Interesting coincidence? Veijo, are you familiar with APL? > > Well, I wrote a couple of programs in APL back in '68 or so on an IBM1130 > with 16kb core memory, 1Mb HD and typewriter I/O (an APL ball :). I remember it well. I think I still have an APL typeball, and a daisywheel from some years later. > The concept was nice, but the available hardware resources were kind of > restricting (and still are if you'd like to handle matrices of, say, > 5000000+ rows and columns :( > > co'o mi'e veion Morgan-Stanley, one of the Wall Street investment companies, wrote its own APL just so they could do that sort of thing. In 1989 they described a Sun workstation with 2G real and 4G virtual memory that they provided their analysts. They use much bigger systems now, of course. IBM has a multiprocessor APL for its 3090s that uses the Fortran math libraries, so it can easily handle matrices bigger than memory. So here is the corollary to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for computing: available hardware limits most people's ability to think. Or, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail (and conversely). -- Edward Cherlin, President Help outlaw Spam by supporting Rep. Chris Smith's bill and opposing the other bills supported by the spammers -- Edward Cherlin, President Help outlaw Spam by supporting Rep. Chris Smith's bill and opposing the other bills supported by the spammers