PDP_11_Simulator VS array

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).

In some of the example programs written in KAP (my APL derivative), I tried to write it in a style that makes people unfamiliar with the array style more comfortable.

This code could of course have been written in a style similar to some of the more extreme examples, and they would have been significantly shorter in that case.

https://github.com/lokedhs/array/blob/master/demo/advent-of-...

This issue isn't directly related to BitSet. I have observed the same thing in my programming language interpreter that runs on the JVM (well, it's written in Kotlin multiplatform so it runs on JS and Natively as well).

I start the interpreter and measue the time it takes to all all then numbers below 1000000000.

The first time I run it after starting the interpreter it always takes 1.4 seconds (within 0.1 second precision). The second time I measure the time it takes 1.7, and for every invocation following that it takes 2 seconds.

If I stop the interpreter and try again, I get exactly the same result.

I have not been able to explain this behaviour. This is on OpenJDK 11 by the way.

If anyone wants to test this, just run the interpreter from here: https://github.com/lokedhs/array

To run the benchmark, type the following command in the UI:

    time:measureTime { +/⍳1000000000 }

I'm the opportunity to mention my project that implements a language that is inspired by, and is mostly compatible with APL. It has some major differences, such as being lazy evaluated and providing support for first-class functions.

It also supports defining syntax extensions which is used by the standard library to provide imperative syntax, which means you can mix traditional APL together with your familiar if/else statements, etc.

At this point there isn't much documentation, and the implementation isn't complete, so I'm not actually suggesting that people run out to try it unless they are really interested in APL. I just took this opportunity since APL is mentioned so rarely here.

https://github.com/lokedhs/array

There is an example of a graphical mandelbrot implementation in the demo directory, that may be interesting.

This post mirrors my feeling on this topic as well. Just like the author, I'm also working on a programming language which will not be used by a lot of people.

In fact, having a lot of users would make things complicated as I would have to stop making incompatible changes if I want to try something new.

Designing your own programming language is such a nice hobby, and something I believe a lot of programmers do. In fact, I would like to see links to other people's programming languages, just to see what people are playing around with at the moment.

Here is my project: https://github.com/lokedhs/array