kona VS PDP_11_Simulator

At first, I thought you were going to be talking about Kona which is another language. You may wish to consider a more unique name, though Kona isn't super well known.

For anyone interested in using a language like APL that doesn't require special symbols, I'd recommend K. You can try it out using Kona.

There are some open source implementations of J and K that you might enjoy.

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).