Kbd VS PDP_11_Simulator

Should you wish to type them on a normal keyboard:

https://abrudz.github.io/lb/apl has a browser bookmarklet which adds an APL language bar to the top of any web page so you can type in any input box with backtick prefixes.

https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd has a Windows Input Method Editor (IME) that adds system-wide RightAlt+letter combos.

This might have been true a couple of years ago but it is totally untrue now.

I'm not sure why you couldn't use the student version of Dyalog? Sounds like it would have been fine. There are also many more FOSS implementations of array languages now, such as ngn/k and April. https://github.com/phantomics/april

'only available for Linux' - not true https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd/ and others (also different input modes like `w for ⍵)

'no community support' - on the contrary there is a big and helpful APL community https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums that is (imo) more useful than stackoverflow

'Dynamic scoping...' - Dyalog's (and other APL's) dfns have lexical scope.

'The language is extremely terse' - is this meant to be a bad thing?

'The code tends to be very hacky' - maybe if you write bad code or try and write C in APL (it won't work)

I don't think so, but maybe - you're actually the first person I've ever seen express that they actually use and prefer the tab input. I'll let https://github.com/abrudz/ know. I need to check but I wonder if that's what the compositions keyboard in https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd is - if not he'll probably be able to make it happen

So Adam says the compositions keyboard is similar but slightly different. While the tab input goes Component1,Component2,Tab the CompUS keyboard from abrudz/Kbd goes AltGr+Component1,Component2. It has not been well tested so please report any issues here: https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd/issues

In general programming I like to use a keyboard layout which allows typing APL glyphs with Right Alt: https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd

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).