Jforum: Absolute beginner question...

Tue Mar 19 00:01:12 HKT 2002

J is a dialect of APL. It implements some extensions 
to APL conceived and developed by Ken Iverson and 
colleagues since 1962. The seminal work is the 
"Operators and Functions" paper in 1978 written 
while Ken was still at IBM; this and other 
important publications in the sequence are:
 Operators and Functions, Research Report #RC7091, 
 IBM Corporation, 1978 4 26.
 Rationalized APL, I.P. Sharp Associates Limited, 
 1983 1 6.
 A Dictionary of APL, APL Quote-Quad, Volume 18, 
 Number 1, 1987 9.
 A Personal View of APL, IBM Systems Journal, 
 Volume 30, Number 4, 1991 12.
The first draft of "A Dictionary of APL" saw light
of day at around January 1984. (It was called
"A Dictionary of the APL Language" then.) The
dictionary was widely circulated within the APL 
community and was developed and refined over 
many drafts.
"A Personal View of APL" gives the best summation
of the "why" of J. This paper is available at
http://home1.gte.net/res057qw/apl_j/IversonAPL.htm
(in the Website of J Forum member Skip Cave).
There is however one correction. In the paper Ken
says that he recruited me to work on J; at the time
the feeling I had was that _I_ recruited _him_.
The first line of code in the J implementation was
written on Sunday, August 27, 1989, at about 4
o'clock in the afternoon. Therefore, the main ideas
in J has had a long gestation (from 1978 or before 
that to 1989).
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Venkat V S S Sastry" <sastry at rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk>
To: <forum at jsoftware.com>
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 02:17 AM
Subject: Jforum: Absolute beginner question...
> Dear Members,
>> I have recently came across J from friends and one student(!) about J.
> Curiosity got better of me, and downloaded the software.
>> From my initial explorations, I couldn't find any articles as to WHY J
> is developed. I would appreciate if some one could point me to such an
> article.

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