K

[Raul Deluth Miller]

I wrote:
   > I found some information on K:
   > ftp://watserv1.waterloo.edu/languages/apl/comp.lang.apl/whitney.on.k.Z

Francois-Rene replied:
   Ok, I've read it. Looks like some ASCIIfied APL, but the article
   isn't very clear to the non APL guru. Sure K seems powerful for
   what it's meant to be (easy statistical analysis), but it seems
   voluntarily limited to this kind of floating point recursive
   list/array/vector manipulation. So, well, sure, we should provide K
   as a subset of our HLL, but I'm not so sure about using it in all
   the project. Well, it's got interesting constructors to iterate and
   parallelize, which we should provide too.

Well, supposedly it's going to be given away to schools for free, so
hopefully before too long it will be more accessible.

As for what it's good for...  K allows you to compile and link C code
>>at run time<<.  That alone covers a lot of ground.

I saw a little demo of it where one guy had written an SQL
interpreter.  It used a yacc grammar (defined in C) but everything
else was written in K.  He said it took about a week to write it,
initially, and that he'd spent a couple months polishing it up and
fixing bugs.  ...It ran about 100 times faster than Sybase on
equivalent hardware.

The article doesn't really show a lot about K -- and, unfortunately, I
don't know enough to fill in the blanks.  Later, hopefully...

   Err, if you want to modify the mailing list, feel free.

Would you believe I accidentally deleted my copy of the instructions?

-- 
Raul D. Miller
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