PDP_11_Simulator VS ok

I can offer you the contrary opinion: why I would not use these kind of languages.

A couple of years ago I worked on a non-trivial APL application with one of my university professors and another student. We were trying to build a CPU simulator flexible enough to handle stuff ranging from PDP-11 up to Intel x86. The goal was to run some analysis on memory accesses performed by the x86 architecture. Quite an interesting project in which I worked on for around two year.

The code is still available if you're interested: https://github.com/emlautarom1/PDP_11_Simulator

The first implementation was done in APL using a book which I don't remember as reference. We had a couple of meetings where we learned APL and the general idea behind the design. Pretty soon we started to deal with a lot of issues like:

- We only found two implementations for the APL interpreter: GNU and Dyalog. GNU is free but pretty much abandoned. Support for Windows was (is?) nonexistent. Dyalogs version is proprietary so we couldn't use that (even when a "student" version was available).

Note that the author also made a k interpreter [0] which has a graphical env to play around with as well.

[0] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok

This - https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok - can also be used sometimes...

If you want to try out K, there are some open source implementations, like John Earnest's oK which has a REPL and a calculator-like interface for mobile phones with a charting feature.

and have the programmer use the word "barchart", they instead prefer to use the definition itself. The word "barchart" has a specific meaning (here, an ascii "bar chart" of 0s and 1s, showing the relative sizes of the values of input array x), but "{x>\:!|/x}" might be useful for more than just bar charts. This idiom contains smaller idioms like "count til max" (!|/) which in turn contains "max" (|/).

Being able to see the code makes it easier to explore and tweak to your specific needs. But more importantly, there are no "official" names for concepts like "count til max". That's just my personal name for it. A python programmer would call it "range". You could come up with your own name for (!|/) that makes perfect sense to you. But that name will probably be longer than its definition, and less flexible.

[1] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok/blob/gh-pages/examples/idi...

check out oK[0] by John Earnest, who is the author of the content of this post

it is well-written manual and is a great jumping off point

there is a k-enthusiast element.io server[1] where you can ask any question you like. folks are friendly!

[0] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok

[1] https://matrix.to/#/#aplfarm-k:matrix.org