[SCC_Active_Members] APL

[Van Snyder]

On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 23:41 -0700, Bob Fraley wrote:

> ... Normally, APL is interpreted because there is no 
> data typing....

At a conference on High Performance Functional Computing, one of the
papers was a report of an APL-to-SISAL translator.  SISAL is a compiled
dataflow language.  Some tests using one version of the SISAL compiler
on Cray X-MP, reported by Dave Card in Communications of the ACM, showed
it out-performing the Cray Fortran compiler on eight computationally-
important "benchmarks," including FFT.  The APL-to-SISAL translator was
a Master's thesis project, but the presenter emphasized that APL was
alive and well in the financial community.  All of this was about ten
years ago.  DoE has discontinued support for SISAL.  Who knows whether
APL is still popular?

-- 
Van Snyder                    |  What fraction of Americans believe 
Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov       |  Wrestling is real and NASA is fake?
Any alleged opinions are my own and have not been approved or disapproved
by JPL, CalTech, NASA, Frederick Gregory, George Bush, or anybody else.