Re:A Personal History of APL (1982)
by 082349872349872 on Sunday December 03, 2023 @02:11PM
(#38509810)
If you're the M Kromberg, any chance you could ask J Scholes to whip up a dfns version of Iverson's 1960 Simplex algo for us?
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Sadly, John Scholes passed away in 2019. https://aplwiki.com/wiki/John_Scholes
Re:A Personal History of APL (1982)
by 082349872349872 on Sunday December 03, 2023 @02:55PM
(#38510157)
Sorry to hear that, but very glad to have run across http://dfns.dyalog.com/downloads/howcomp.pdf as a result...
John was working on implementing negative right arguments to ⎕DL (the delay function in all APL implementations). As soon as that is sorted, we expect him to reappear.
John once did a live demo where a negative number (like ¯17.01) suddenly appeared in his APL session log. He looked puzzled for a moment, continued with his demo script for a little while, and arrived at the statement ⎕DL ¯17 (delay negative 17 seconds, and return the actual amount of time waited). He exclaimed "Oh, THAT's what that was!" and continued with his demo.
John had a fantastic sense of humour, if you have not seen them I recommend taking a little time off to watch some of the recordings at https://johnscholes.rip/video/