4th.CoSy
Just time to Whet Your Appitite , can chat later
Is a "Work in progress"

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity
Erik Christopher Zeeman new window

I am indebted to Christopher for my thoughts on the origin of consciousness

APL implements the simplicities needed to master complexities .

Another time when I was concerned about getting credit for some idea I had,
[ Ken Iverson ] said, "Arthur, if it's a really good idea,you're going to have to shove it down people's throats."
Arthur Whitney : Memories of Ken new window

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure
than 10 functions on 10 data structures.
Alan Perlis : Epigrams in Programming #9 new window

APL : MAXIMALLY EXPRESSIVE NOTATION FOR SPECIFICATION

OF FINITE ALGORITHMS

FORTH : MINIMAL VOCABULARY TO CREATE EXTENSIBLE DICTIONARY

Bit o History

Learned APL in the mid '70s when realized needed to learn multidimensional geometry and Ken Iverson's APL generalized the algebra and made it executable .
Learned of Forth in early '80s when saw Tron with some hardware tekies at Xerox . Pointed me to Byte special issue . Rochester relative hotbed of Forth .

Everyone with any teky sense used the 68000 .

Among us , Ryu Oosake was the most courageous pioneer . Around 1983 , probably steered by Phil VanCleave , he contacted me about his plan to make an 68000 notebook with APL in ReadOnlyMemory . I remember suggesting to him he also look to FORTH as the foundation of his environment .

Ryu came to New York from Tokyo , but we failed to get together because of the last 250 miles . It is not at all clear that history would have been different if we had.

http://www.cosy.com/language/cosyhard/cosyhard.htm

BushWacking

I don't know how you are supposed to implement a language .
Never lived in C/UNIX .
4th.CoSy is Interactive language lab , breadboard
Straddles FORTH and Array Language
one Fn key executes as FORTH , one assumes CoSy

Generalized Array Language

Reference counted Lists of lists ( a la Backus Turing speech )
recursive data structures and associated vocabulary .
Verbs & adverbs ( functions & operators ) acting on these lists .

atomic verbs , eg : + * = , act on leaves ( atoms )
adverbs generally mapping verbs to collections of lists , eg : each , eachleft , eachright , across , scan

Modulo indexing ( -1 indexes last element ) unique to CoSy but I like it
Objects ( defined by header ) . 4 cells

type count
bits % item /
reference count meta <---
body of object
--->nbsp;
Dictionary relation : list of 2 lists : ( symbols ; values )

NB : operators like each , etc , are definitionally parallel

The enabling algorithms are the transformation of a reference counted recursive allocated list of lists to a simple saveable list and back again . The real bear is taming reference counts and decrementing and freeing of all the leaves of recursive trees .

Goals

Personal Artificially Aided Intelligence

Open code from gate arrays to data arrays
Language is a bush , not a horizon ; optimize by using vocabulary at appropriate level

Deal with business of life
( which involves a lot of accounting and form filing )