Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation

I take credit as a go-between, not as an inventor. Ken Knowlton introduced the notation ABC in BEFLIX, a pixel-based animation language. Ken didn't need an operator because identifiers were single letters. I showed Ken's scheme to Bud Lawson, the originator of PL/I's pointer facility. Bud liked it and came up with the vivid -> notation to accommodate longer identifiers. If I had a real gift of notation I would have come up with the pipe symbol. In my original notation ls|wc was written ls>wc>. Ken Thompson invented | a couple of months later. That was so influential that recently, in a paper that had nothing to do with Unix, I saw | referred to as the "pipe character"! APL is a fascinating invention, but can be so compact as to be inscrutable. (I confess not to have practiced APL enough to become fluent.) In the same vein, Haskell's powerful higher-level functions make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for improved readability. Human impatience balks at tarrying over a saying that puts so much in a small space. Yet it helps once you learn it. Try reading transcripts of medieval Arabic algebra carried out in words rather than symbols. Iverson's hardware descriptions in APL are another case where symbology pays off. Doug