: I'm intentionally drawing some parallels here, because history has a strange
: way of repeating itself.  Would you actually *want* to use APL to centre
: a line of text even if it is smaller than Perl??  If you answer no as I
: suspect most of you will, consider carefully the *reasons why* you are
: saying no.
:
: Think about it.  If it did the job better than Perl, why would you consider it
: an inapropriate choice for this task?  Are they not the same reasons I have
: been suggesting about Perl?

If you can find me a version of APL that gives me efficient access to
traditional Unix operations, with traditional orthography, and doesn't
treat text as funny lists of numbers, and interfaces easily with the
rest of Unix, and lets me optimize not just for abstruse brevity, but
also (when the fit takes me) for readability, or portability, or
maintainability, or speed, or memory usage, or most especially,
programmer efficiency, then I'll be glad to use APL.

Until then, I would say the analogy limps somewhat.

When you go to help out a friend at his house, you take some of your
tools with you.  Fine.  My toolbox is fairly well organized and
self-contained.  I just carry it in the door, and plop it down in the
room with the leaky faucet, and never have to go back out to my car.
Yes, it was heavy to carry in, but that's a well considered sacrifice.
You, on the other hand, drive up with a pickup truck full of loose odds
and ends.  Then you go in, search your friend's garage for the right
tool, don't find it, or worse, find it, waste time trying to use it
until it breaks, go out and rummage about for the right tool, maybe go
down to the hardware store to buy it if you don't have it, come back,
notice how much wetter the carpet is since the last time you saw it...

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to
pay another nickel.  But hey!  You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

Larry Wall
lw...@netlabs.com