[To obtain the latest versions of the documents in this section, see the document home sites index.]

APL and J

Development tools · Tutorials and FAQs · External resources

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.


Development tools:

APL Plus special edition, a free APL interpreter for DOS
I-APL, another free APL interpreter for DOS
TryAPL2, a free version of IBM's APL2 interpreter for DOS
J 3.02, a free implementation of J from J Software


Tutorials and FAQs:

The APL FAQ
"Computers and Mathematical Notation", a basic introduction to J by Kenneth Iverson
An introduction to J for the APL Programmer
The J FAQ
The Functional Programming FAQ


External resources:

ACM SIGAPL, the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group on APL
The APL and J archives at the University of Waterloo in Ontario (mirrored in Vienna)
Vector, the journal of the British APL Association (a specialist group of the BCS)
Jim Weigang's APL information page
J Software, the official home of J
APL links at Yahoo (or at Yahoo UK)
J links at Yahoo (or at Yahoo UK)
The newsgroup comp.lang.apl