Defending the ternary operator

[Laura Creighton]

> >> Once you do know what they mean, APL programs are often much easier
> >> to understand than their counterparts in other languages.
> 
> Laura> Then you go away for six months and code in some other language.
> Laura> And then you get a bug report. You look at your code and no longer
> Laura> remember what the heck it was that you were trying to do.  
> 
> In 1976 I wrote an entire student-registration system in APL.
> In 1977, not having looked at the code for a year, I was brought
> back to make some major changes to it.
> 
> I had no trouble understanding what the code was doing.

You never had that experience?  That makes you the very first APL
programmer I have conversed with for whom that is true.  I thought
that it was a universal.  Happened to everybody ... at least once.

> >From that experience, I can say confidently that APL's lack of
> data-abstraction facilities is a much more bigger problem than its
> brevity.
> 
> Incidentally, that code was still in use when I checked back 15 years
> later.

Unmodified?  Maybe they were scared to touch it :-)

Laura