What about the workspace?

Yeah, what about it?

The first thing that attracted me to APL was, unsurprisingly, the
array features and the rock solid foundation they stood on. But what
really sold me didn't have much to do with the language proper: it was
the golden trinity of the Workspace, the Interpreter and the Session
Manager. To me, this was a "symbolic virtual reality" where anything
could be done. To be fair, I guess Smalltalk/Lisp people would claim
the same about their working environment. Not that they have the real
world pedigree (specifically in finance and insurance) that APL can
claim.

For comparison, take a look at the current state of Visual Studio and
C#. If they did it right = the APL way:

1) The Immediate Window in VS would be front and center of the
development process, as the Session Manager is in APL work (or is it
still? I haven't kept up).

2) You would be able to "unit test" a single function/method without
recompiling everything.

3) You would be able to create and change global data, not needing
any stack "running". And no, I am NOT advocating globals in production
code.

4) Functions, as well as other objects, would appear "free-floating"
and would be stored with their own timestamp in a database. They would
not be manipulated sequentially in .cs files, leading the brain to
erroneously see logic behind the often haphazard placement of text in
such files (when I see order, I would prefer it to MEAN something!).

5) As a consequence of the prior point, I would be kept from always
paging too far up and down in the code editor.

6) ... I could go on for quite a bit, but I think I've made my point.
Current supposed state-of-the-art still has a way to go to catch up
with APL, especially if you include the IDE stuff. And there is no
reason for them not to catch up, now that "managed code" is
potentially giving them all the benefits of an interpreted language.

Granted, the workspace may be long outdated as a "persistent object".
But as a temporary in-memory assembly of stuff needed to perform some
work, during or after development, I still find it the best model I
have seen. Even in this day and age.

And the future? Well, "cloud computing" seems to be the current
buzzword. The way I take it, you will not have to worry about where
your databases reside; they will reside at some unspecified server or
servers on the web. Your workspace would then in effect be the URL to
an "assemblage of pointers", pointers to the diverse functions and
data streams you need for a specific task. Great - until the line goes
down. So... I guess there might still be a place for the locally saved
workspace.

....................

BTW: APL was mentioned with some reverence in a recent episode of the
tech podcast "FLOSS Weekly", as an influence on Smalltalk. And I guess
you all know the story of Steve Jobs visiting the Smalltalk group at
Xerox, getting the idea of GUIs and mice for the Mac, subsequently
leading to Windows by Microsoft (headed by one-time APL interpreter
builder Bill Gates). Wheels within wheels... Isn't APL actually the
digital equivalent of the freemasons, all-powerful but always lurking
somewhere behind the scene?

Yes, you are absolutely right. The workspace is a key feature of APL,
and central to its appeal. APL is still one of the very few languages
where you can realistically test functions (and, nowadays, classes)
individually, especially since APL makes it so easy to create arrays
of test data. As an environment for testing out ideas and building up
solutions, the workspace combined with a modern development
environment has huge advantages. Visual Studio just isn't the same.
Even dynamic languages like Ruby aren't as good in this respect.

Interestingly, the workspace also comes into its own as a natural and
incredibly simple way of implementing 'persistent objects'. See:
http://www.vector.org.uk/archive/v234/marsden.htm

Richard Nabavi
MicroAPL Ltd

APL: The Session, the Workspace and Microsoft Visual Studio:

All excellent points about APL and Visual Studio.
That's why we developed VisualAPL which provides the features you want
AND does it in the mainstream Windows Microsoft Visual Studio
development platform. Please see: http://forum.apl2000.com/viewtopic.php?p=1289#1289
for an illustrative example.

Joe_Blaze wrote:
> APL: The Session, the Workspace and Microsoft Visual Studio:
>
> All excellent points about APL and Visual Studio.
> That's why we developed VisualAPL which provides the features you want
> AND does it in the mainstream Windows Microsoft Visual Studio
> development platform. Please see: http://forum.apl2000.com/viewtopic.php?p=1289#1289
> for an illustrative example.

Interesting. I'm curious though, where the input line is 1 2 3/X ,
where is the display of the LENGTH ERROR which should have occurred?
..
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

On Aug 26, 2:49*pm, Rav <Pa...@cais.com> wrote:
> Joe_Blaze wrote:
> > APL: The Session, the Workspace and Microsoft Visual Studio:
>
> > All excellent points about APL and Visual Studio.
> > That's why we developed VisualAPL which provides the features you want
> > AND does it in the mainstream Windows Microsoft Visual Studio
> > development platform. Please see:http://forum.apl2000.com/viewtopic.php?p=1289#1289
> > for an illustrative example.
>
> Interesting. *I'm curious though, where the input line is *1 2 3/X *,
> where is the display of the LENGTH ERROR which should have occurred?
> .
> ** Posted fromhttp://www.teranews.com**

I did not press enter on that line, so the line was not executed and
no error should be displayed. Instead I just 'cursored down' to
rewrite the line correctly. I should have erased that line and I will
in a updated version.

On Aug 26, 3:03*pm, Joe_Blaze <joe.bl...@apl2000.com> wrote:
> On Aug 26, 2:49*pm, Rav <Pa...@cais.com> wrote:
>
> > Joe_Blaze wrote:
> > > APL: The Session, the Workspace and Microsoft Visual Studio:
>
> > > All excellent points about APL and Visual Studio.
> > > That's why we developed VisualAPL which provides the features you want
> > > AND does it in the mainstream Windows Microsoft Visual Studio
> > > development platform. Please see:http://forum.apl2000.com/viewtopic.php?p=1289#1289
> > > for an illustrative example.
>
> > Interesting. *I'm curious though, where the input line is *1 2 3/X *,
> > where is the display of the LENGTH ERROR which should have occurred?
> > .
> > ** Posted fromhttp://www.teranews.com**
>
> I did not press enter on that line, so the line was not executed and
> no error should be displayed. Instead I just 'cursored down' to
> rewrite the line correctly. I should have erased that line and I will
> in a updated version.

Go to: http://forum.apl2000.com/viewtopic.php?p=1289#1289 to see the
updated .pdf, which illustrates both the traditional APL error
reporting in immediate mode in the session and using []dm and the
Visual Studio exception handling using []dmx.

On Aug 25, 9:52 pm, admin9...@hotmail.com wrote:

> To be fair, I guess Smalltalk/Lisp people would claim
> the same about their working environment. Not that they have the real
> world pedigree (specifically in finance and insurance) that APL can
> claim.

??

In the 90s there were a lot more Smalltalk developers on Wall Street
(and in the City of London) than there were APL developers.

Romilly