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Musings

This category collects personal thoughts and opinions from Team Dyalog: programming puzzles solved for the fun of it, mathematical proofs worked out in APL, performance investigations sparked by a colleague’s problem, and reflections on the language, teaching, and the craft of programming itself.

Diane’s Lasagne Problem

In: Dyalog '18, Events, Musings

Making Lasagne Participants in the SA2 Performance Tuning workshop at the Dyalog ’18 User Meeting were encouraged to bring their own problems for the group... Read

By

Roger Hui

November 2018

Permuting Internal Letters

In: Musings, Recreational

Friday Afternoon It’s something of a custom in Dyalog to send a “fun” e-mail to the group on Friday afternoons. My gambit for this past... Read

By

Roger Hui

January 2018

50847534

In: Algorithms, APL Language, Musings

⎕io←0 throughout. I was re-reading A Mathematician’s Apology before recommending it to Suki Tekverk, our summer intern, and came across a statement... Read

By

Roger Hui

September 2016

Constructions

In: Musings

Suki Tekverk, a summer intern, spent the last two weeks here studying APL. She will be a high school senior next September and is adept in math, so in addition... Read

By

Roger Hui

August 2016

The Story of a Summer Intern

In: Musings

by Suki Tekverk As a born and raised New Yorker, I thought I had seen it all, but two short weeks spent in Vancouver with Roger Hui and his family proved me... Read

By

guestBlogger

August 2016

Loops, Folds and Tuples

In: APL Language, Musings, Tips and Tricks

For-loops Given an initial state defined by a number of variables, a for-loop iterates through its argument array modifying the state. A←... ⋄... Read

By

John Scholes

May 2016

Type Comments

In: APL Language, Musings

I’ve taken to commenting the closing brace of my inner dfns with a home-grown type notation pinched from the Functional Programming community: dref←{... Read

By

John Scholes

July 2015

Response to Name Colouring for Dfns

In: APL Language, Musings

This post contains comments to John Scholes’ post on name colouring; please continue to post any further comments with the original post. This is a very... Read

By

Morten Kromberg

June 2015

Name Colouring for Dfns

In: APL Language, Musings

APL is sometimes criticised because expressions that include names cannot, in general, be parsed without knowing whether the names represent functions or... Read

By

John Scholes

May 2015

Do Functions Know Their Own Names?

In: APL Language, Musings

Going back a long way when John Scholes and I were writing version 0 of Dyalog there was a big discussion about whether functions knew their own names. This... Read

By

Geoff Streeter

May 2015

Unforgettable Numbers

In: Musings

Professor Kip Murray asked on the J Forum for the “unforgettable” times seen on a 24-hour digital clock. The problem is that every number has... Read

By

Roger Hui

March 2015

Foo, Shmoo

In: APL Language, Musings

“We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the... Read

By

John Scholes

February 2015

What’s Your Favourite Beautiful Squiggle?

In: Musings

Roger’s post speculating on Ken Iverson’s favourite APL expression reminded me that one of the delegates at Dyalog ’14 conducted a quick... Read

By

Fiona Smith

December 2014

Ken Iverson’s Favourite APL Expression?

In: APL Language, Musings

What was Ken Iverson’s favourite APL expression? I don’t know that he had one and if he had I don’t know what it was, but if I have to guess …... Read

By

Roger Hui

December 2014

Musings on Reduction

In: APL Language, Musings

In one man’s humble opinion, reduction (⌿) is the Queen of Operators. Each (¨) comes a close second, but doesn’t get the cigar because each can... Read

By

John Scholes

November 2014

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