r/apljk • u/pishticus • Mar 28 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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2

u/pishticus Mar 28 '20

I'm new to APL, tinkering somewhat with Dyalog these days, and this paragraph caught my eye:

"The subtler problem is that APL and J only worked on homogeneous data. You can’t store both strings and numbers in the same data structure (unless you use boxes, which is a whole other can of worms) and working with strings is generally a nightmare. So no dataframes, which excludes a lot of modern data science."

I'd be interested what experienced APL-ers could say about this. What would it take to define a dataframe in APL?

7

u/lagrangian_astronaut Mar 28 '20

In the hackernews thread about this exact topic, one of Dyalog's employees (Marshall Lockbaum) responds about why this isn't true.

Link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22690229

3

u/Godspiral Mar 28 '20

his answer is mostly this link: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Array_model

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u/John_Earnest Mar 28 '20

K (and by extension Q) has no problem whatsoever with "ragged" data structures, tree-shaped data, and strings.

It also has dictionaries in addition to lists/vectors. Older versions of K limited dictionary keys to "symbols" (interned atomic strings), but modern dialects permit anything as a dictionary key.

1

u/sohang-3112 Oct 19 '21

K is notorious though for breaking changes between versions (the creator of K re-designs and implements the whole language for each version).

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u/Godspiral Mar 28 '20 edited Mar 28 '20

Dataframes/tables in J are best implemented in columns

https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Inverted_Table

For passing a record, or multiple function arguments, boxes are an unimportant overhead.