Re: why rpg and not cobol

Oh how can that be! C has NoThInG like all those "interesting" symbols.

I worked for a year as a contractor at IBM in Rochester. At the interview, there were about 4 people. One asked me if I knew about APL. I said, "That turkey!" Well, all I really knew was, there are fonts on the iSeries called APL-something.

It was a trap - the guy I'd be working under just LOVED APL. It's a good thing he could be even more irascible than I, without being as politically ignorant as I.

I survived that - and was testing stuff in the "new" query engine, which it was never called in the wild, bad connotations and all that!

Vern

----- Original Message -----
Hi, John:

And, C can be almost as cryptic and obtuse as APL ... :-\

Mark

On 4/12/2013 9:49 AM, John Yeung wrote:
On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 11:09 PM, Vernon Hamberg
<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Do I hear someone calling out APL? Yeah, often called a "write-only"
language!

:)

I have to admit that was the main language I was thinking of. The
now-classic "conciseness of APL" demo is writing Conway's Game of Life
in one line. This probably trumps other languages' one- and two-liner
quicksorts.

Never mind reading; even writing it is no small feat. Hence Stan
Kelly-Bootle's famous

There are three things a man must do
before his life is done;
Write two lines in APL,
And make the buggers run.

John