From: "John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@...>
Date: 2007-02-08T08:00:09+09:00
Subject: Re: REPL driven programming

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> John W. Kennedy wrote:
>> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>>> ...what happened to APL?
>>
>> VisiCalc.
>>
>> (I mean that quite seriously. It cut the legs off one of APL's main 
>> gateways.)
>>
> Could you even do a linear regression in VisiCalc, let alone in one line 
> of code? I thought that entered the spreadsheet vocabulary with Lotus 
> 1-2-3.

It's been ages since I used VisiCalc, so I really have no idea. But as a 
purely practical issue, the COBOL-oriented mainframe world was just 
beginning to open the door to APL for what-if purposes when VisiCalc on 
back-door Apple IIs (and, later, official IBM PCs) aborted it. IBM tried 
to bring APL to the PC (it was the first piece of software to require an 
8087), but the opportunity had passed.

-- 
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
   -- Charles Williams.  "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"