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APL and J
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Originally developed as a theoretical language by Kenneth Iverson in his
book "A Programming Language" (Wiley, 1962), APL was not actually
implemented until the late 1960s by IBM. It has a reputation for being
extremely cryptic but powerful, and is notorious for the power to write
incomprehensible one-line programs which do amazing things (partly due
to its use of a non-ASCII character set). J is a successor to APL, and
is essentially a superset of APL (but one for which the ASCII character
code is sufficient!). J can be used as a pure functional programming
language like Lisp,
ML or
Haskell.