Affiliation:
1. Snake Island Research Inc., 18 Fifth Street, Ward's Island, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2B9, Canada
2. Iverson Software Inc., 33 Major Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2K9, Canada
Abstract
Gerunds, verbal forms that can be used as nouns, are recognized as having utility in the realm of programming languages. We show that gerunds can be viewed as arrays of atomic representations of verbs (functions), in a way which is consistent with the syntax and semantics of APL, and which allows verbs to be first class objects in the language. We define derivations of verbs from gerunds in the J dialect of APL, and show how these derivations provide control structures for sequencing, selection (in the sense of generalized forms of CASE or SWITCH statements and IF/THEN/ELSE), iteration (DO UNTIL), recursion, and parallel computation (MIMD, or Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data). We conclude with alternative representations of verbs which are useful in other contexts.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Cited by
9 articles.
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1. A Rosetta Stone for array languages;Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages, and Compilers for Array Programming;2018-06-19
2. The role of composition in computer programming;ACM SIGAPL APL Quote Quad;1995-06-08
3. A parallel correlation-based algorithm in J learns neural network connections;ACM SIGAPL APL Quote Quad;1994-10
4. Structured APL;ACM SIGAPL APL Quote Quad;1993-09
5. Identification of parallelism in neural networks by simulation with language J.;ACM SIGAPL APL Quote Quad;1993-09