APL*Plus/PC Programming Language

Ad from the May 28th, 1985 issue of PC Magazine

APL is one of those older programming languages that I never had any experience with. I did a bit of 68000 assembly in college, a little Ada during a summer internship and a bit of FORTRAN in my first job...but I've never even seen APL.

APL is among the oldest computer programming languages. It was first developed in the 1960s. It was first used on mainframe systems such as the IBM 1130, System/370, etc. It is somewhat unique in that it uses a large variety of symbols to represent most functions. It also uses a multidimensional array as its primary data type.

Eventually, APL implementations were developed for microcomputers including the PC. This ad from the May 28th, 1985 issue of PC Magazine is for one such implementation called APL*Plus/PC. It advertises features such as full-screen editing, a built-in terminal emulator, communications, graphics, and report formatting. The minimum requirements are not listed so my assumption would be that this could be used on a standard IBM PC which typically included an 8088 CPU and 256K of RAM at the time.

APL*Plus was an enhancement of standard APL that included business-oriented extensions such as data formatting and external file handling. Ports were available for a wide variety of systems including this one for the PC. There were numerous other varieties of APL as well. If you were interested in this implementation of APL*Plus for the PC, it would set you back nearly $600. That's $1771 in today's dollars accounting for inflation.

See https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Simple_examples for some examples of APL. It's very concise but it sure seems hard to read. I guess you got used to it and once you were, it looks like you could implement some pretty powerful data manipulations quickly.

Like most old languages, APL never really died. It never really became a mainstream language but it is still used today in finance and in some other data heavy sectors. It also influenced modern alternatives such as MATLAB and certain aspects of Python.

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