Thread: Obfuscated Code
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Old 30th October 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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I used to be an APL programmer, back in the late '70s. And through until around 1981, or so, when I moved to systems programming (today, that would be systems administration, but back then, we modified our OSes to meet requirements).

APL had some interesting capabilities, helpful for financial analysis applications (I was working for a commodities trading firm). Special keyboards and terminals were needed, however.

I did end up learning how to pronounce and spell most of the Greek alphabet, of course, as any APL programmer would. But along with Ro and Pho and Theta, we also used words to describe symbolic functions that were not Greek. The left and right arrows, for example, were called the "guzinta" and "guzouta".

One could write a line of code that would perform an operation on a large vector of numbers, that might contain, for example, twenty thousand integers, all at once. But, if the programmer misplaced a comma, rather than making a single arithmetic operation on twenty thousand numbers at once, one would instead execute twenty thousand individual operations. You'd get the same results, but thousands of times more slowly. Just from putting the comma in the wrong place.

I moved from APL to S/370 Assembler. The latter was so much clearer and easier to understand.
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